By Tania Phillips
A big season of netball came to an end on Saturday with the grand final of the Intermediate and Seniors competitions and presentation day for the Stanthorpe Netball Association.
Association president Natalie Vedelago it was a successful year which seemed to have gone very quickly.
“We had 160 registrations this year which is a little bit up on previous years,” she said.
“That’s from five years up into our opens across all of the age groups. It really has been a good year as far as numbers go and we have a lot of young Net-Set-Go players, so from five to ten, which is our heaviest membership. But we also have a lot of players in intermediates too.”
She said as well as the local competition the association had six representative teams in the Interdistrict competition this year.
“With our Saturday fixtures and our rep netball it’s been another busy year,” she said.
Despite being one of the small associations the representative teams still did well but missed out on the finals.
“Even though we didn’t come away with the trophies we are very competitive and very skillful,” Vedelago said.
“It’s great that the girls get a chance to play netball at the higher level. They gain a lot from travelling and playing other associations.”
Saturday saw the presentation of the awards for the year as well as the two finals. In the intermediate Garnets beat Opals while in the Seniors Jumping Kangaroos beat the Cool Koalas.
“That seniors game was a nail-biting game, they only won by one in the last 15-20 seconds,” she said.
“It was quite a close game with lots of end-to-end netball. It was quite competitive and a good game to watch.”
Vedelago said it was a fitting end to the season.
“We had a big crowd,” she said.
“It was really quite nice, we had a lady doing face painting, we had a sausage sizzle, dancing between games. We had the Nutbush and the then the Macarena for the kids, they loved it. We had a shooting competition, prizes – it was a nice eventful day.”
She said the past two years they have run a mixed summer social competition but they didn’t know at this stage whether that will happen again this year.
“We haven’t discussed whether we will be going to have that again this year yet,” she said.
“We are yet to make that decision.”
Samantha Wantling captured the action in the nail-biting seniors clash.
