Top 5: Nat Medhurst’s comeback, Commonwealth Games magic and more 2023 netball highlights

West Coast Fever won their first Super Netball premiership, while the Gina Rinehart funding saga created unwanted headlines for the sport after an impressive triumph in Birmingham.

CODE Sports covered all the highs and lows. Linda Pearce broke several news stories, most notably the sale of Super Netball grand-final hosting rights, while we also showcased the expert opinion of Nat Medhurst, Bianca Chatfield, Caitlin Bassett and Lisa Alexander.

These are five of our most insightful stories of 2022.

Nat Medhurst: Why I’m making a netball comeback

NAT MEDHURST’s career ended with a devastating phone call from a teammate that still haunts her. Complex emotions have inspired her to make a comeback at 38, as a mum of two.

They say sleep deprivation makes you do crazy things. So, let’s blame that for my most recent decision.

To return to netball.

At the tender age of 38 and following the birth of two children, with my youngest currently three months old, I am going to don my first netball dress since December 2019. Ask my fiancé and he’ll tell you he thinks I’m crazy.

To be honest, I agree with him.

When I retired in 2020, there was no way I ever thought I would be back playing some form of elite netball. Even social netball was never on my radar.

Having been kept somewhat at arm’s length from the sport since retiring due to the impacts of Covid, sitting courtside this season as a member of the FOX Sports commentary team got me back up close and personal with the game that I had identified with for 17 years. And as I watched the players battling it out, it made me realise how much I missed it.

It made me wonder: could I still match it with them?

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The magic and mayhem of 1998

The night before the inaugural Commonwealth Games netball final, Australia’s team manager stormed outside in her nightie and tore strips off rowdy Aussie athletes, writes LINDA PEARCE.

Perhaps the funniest inside story from netball’s 1998 Commonwealth Games debut is the one about the middle-aged team manager storming around the village in Kuala Lumpur late on the eve of the gold medal game to demand quiet from hard-partying athletes whose competitions were already over.

Bronwyn Roberts was in her nightie at the time, according to coach Jill McIntosh and multiple players who still chuckle at the memory, while then-captain Vicki Wilson embellishes the tale with the addition of some — possibly fictional — hair curlers.

“I just remember Bronny going downstairs in her nightie and just tearing strips off the Australian athletes for being noisy and inconsiderate when we were trying to have a good night’s sleep. It was just mayhem!’’ Wilson says.

“A night to remember. We were cheering her on and going, ‘You tell ’em, Bron!’ So there she was with her dressing gown on and the hair in rollers, and she didn’t mince her words.’’

Amid the yahooing, furniture was thrown from windows into the nearby swimming pool, with athletes confined to the official compound by a mass anti-government demonstration in the Malaysian capital earlier on that steamy September day.

Word has it that a young Liz Ellis was particularly vocal about the lack of sleep, while Kathryn Harby-Williams, now the CEO of the players’ association, recalls that amid the couch-tossing from high-rise apartments, “I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m about to play one of the biggest games of my life and it’s 2am and I haven’t been to sleep!’ I remember that as clear as day.’’

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Donnell Wallam’s unfair burden

Racist, hurtful and uninformed abuse couldn’t stop Donnell Wallam from inspiring her team and her nation, writes NAT MEDHURST.

Donnell Wallam’s scream said so much.

It was the joy of nailing a last second goal to secure victory for the Diamonds over England. It was the pride of debuting for her country, thus becoming one of only three Indigenous women to have done so.

And it was everything she has no doubt wanted to say but hasn’t – or couldn’t – after a week like no other in Australian netball.

Wallam has carried an enormous, and unfair, burden.

Most recently that has taken the form of comments in mainstream and social media, many of which have been abhorrent. Racist, hurtful, uninformed about the Hancock Prospecting issue and not understanding of the environment within the national team. The impact of this abuse can be extreme and incredibly damaging on an individual, regardless of their profession. Wallam didn’t deserve any of it. It must have been isolating, painful and impossible to escape.

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Sunday Aryang’s Diamonds journey

Sunday Aryang and her ‘fairy godmother’ cry when speaking about each other. Their special bond was the beginning of the first African-born Diamond’s incredible rise, writes LINDA PEARCE.

Beside the training court in Perth in 2019, a pair of coaches locked eyes. No words were needed to describe the irresistible flash of talent the West Coast Fever’s Stacey Marinkovich and her assistant Sue Gaudion had just seen.

Sunday Aryang had recently joined the club as a training partner and, soon enough, half-court match practice involving the quiet Ethiopian-born teenager doubled as a very loud entrance.

“I remember her coming out and taking this intercept and it was so seamless, so perfectly timed, that you just wanted to take a photo, because it just needed to be captured,’’ says Gaudion, the former player and long-time commentator who is now Fever’s head of netball.

“At that moment, I looked over at Stace, who was coach at the time, and our eyes both went, ‘Holy heck. Like, wow’. That was three years back and you could just go, ‘Right, there is something in this kid’.

“But you could also see she needed to build up the body a bit. She was getting pushed off the ball quite easily and things like that, but there were other little moments where she excited you. She just excited you.’’

Later that season, the long-limbed defender made her Fever debut after being elevated from the extended squad. In the next, 2020, and still without a contract or prospect of substantial game time, she took the risk of quitting her job in aged care to travel to the Queensland hub; duly playing all 14 games plus finals to win Australian 21/U selection for the (postponed, then cancelled) World Youth Cup.

By 2021, she had truly arrived — with Giants’ shooter Sophie Dwyer — as one of the competition’s brightest young stars before, in January’s Quad Series in London, becoming the first ever African-born Diamond.

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The curious case of Kim Ravaillion’s snub

Many good judges would have had Kim Ravaillion in their final Commonwealth Games team, yet she hasn’t even made the extended squad. LINDA PEARCE analyses Australia’s selections.

News Kim Ravaillion was devastated to hear is a Diamonds’ selection decision many netball followers are struggling to understand.

When arguably the best-performed centre in the second half of the previous Super Netball season and the opening five games of this one answered her phone on Monday, it was not the hoped-for call from Diamonds coach Stacey Marinkovich to learn of a belated Diamonds recall after being contentiously overlooked last year.

Instead, it was to be told by the Queensland Firebirds’ Megan Anderson that she had — even more controversially — missed a place in the 18-strong national squad for 2022/23.

Which means that, despite up to four spots theoretically being kept open for late additions before the final cut to 12 is made by the end of May, there is little chance the former Commonwealth Games and World Cup gold medallist will get to Birmingham in July for what would have been her third Games.

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