Netball in Samoa

No one will be surprised to hear that Angela has already found herself a netball team. Apparently the netball season is due to get underway in a couple of weeks and there have been ads in the paper for teams looking for players. So Angela bowled along to netball practice last Saturday afternoon and came home a couple hours later hot, sweaty and red-faced, but saying that it was good fun and it looks like she has found a team. This will be the first season for a few years, I am not sure what has happened over the last few years, but this year there seems to be plenty of keen netballers around and her team is a mix of Samoans and a few kiwis and aussies.

It turns out that many of the teams like to practice against their male partners, so part of netball practice consists of a boys against girls game. Because of this the men also get plenty of netball practice and have their own league, and that’s right I have been ‘encouraged’ to join in. This netball setup is a lot more organised than anything I have ever seen – practice 2 nights a week, plus a game on Saturday once the season starts. So on Tuesday I reported for my first ever netball practice. Even though we started at 5.00 pm it was still around 28º - too hot to be running around the netball court. After going through our warm ups we did some skill drills. All of this was new to me, but I muddled my way through. It was a bit hard to follow some of the instructions, especially the ones that were in Samoan! So there was a bit of confusion, a few dropped balls and lots of laughs. It wasn’t quite as bad as the time that my rugby team had to do an aerobics class!

Then we split into our teams and I got to meet the rest of the ‘boys’. I had noticed that there were a few faafafines around the court, but once I was introduced to the team I realised that about half of the team are faafafines. (For those of you that don’t know what a faafafine is, Google it!). They are a friendly bunch and pretty soon we had our team sorted out, ready to take on the girls. I seem to have found a spot at Goal Defence and I think I was doing OK. I managed to grab a few intercepts and didn’t get penalised too much. I even got to mark Angela for a while. It turns out that some of the faafaines are pretty good netballers. I think we were beating the girls team! Of course there are 1 or 2 of the faafafines that seemed to flounce around the court more worried about their hair than the game! They certainly add a bit of colour and humour to our practices.

So, after an hour and a half of running around the netball court I was hot, sweaty and completely worn out. But I will be back for more, next practice is tomorrow night!