Linda Pearce is the Chief Tennis Writer and general sports reporter for The Age. She writes about a range of sports, including football, netball, and gymnastics. Linda has twice been named Australian tennis writer of the year.
For almost a decade, until Collingwood's recent arrival, Melbourne had been a one-team netball town. The Vixens now have a rich, influential and highly, highly-ambitious rival. Simone McKinnis welcomes the competition. The attention. The challenge to improve.
Eddie McGuire has a vision. Involving Collingwood, naturally, but not quite what you might think. The Magpie president sees a sellout crowd for one of the big clashes of next season - the 2017 netball season. He imagines a swarm of girls playing on temporary courts marked on the club's oval, then watching the local national league derby on the big screen nearby. Perhaps some water slides, one staffer suggested, slightly tongue-in-cheek. Except that it's not a joke. Call this a sporting Disneyland. Or netball nirvana. Eddie does.
Had Alice Teague-Neeld been born a decade earlier, she would be combining study and a part-time job with an elite club netball career that barely paid enough to cover her petrol bills. Teague-Neeld is among the lucky ones. Her third season will coincide with extraordinary changes at the top of a game played by more Australian women than any other.
Madi Robinson can not talk about her destination - Collingwood - until her contract is signed and cleared by the compliance manager employed to police netball's expanded $675,000 salary cap.
In a new era for women's sport in Australia, the game with more than 500,000 participants is finally rewarding the elite few at the pointy end with a significant step towards the full-time professionalism it is hoped will arrive within five years.
Bernard Tomic has joined a Davis Cup squad missing the injury-challenged Nick Kyrgios, in Melbourne, to prepare for next week's Davis Cup tie. In Sydney.
Fears that new the birth of powerful new rival Collingwood would diminish the nine-year-old Melbourne Vixens have been realised, with captain Madi Robinson set to defect to the Magpies for the inaugural national league season.
The ANZ Championship may exist no longer, but the trans-Tasman rivalry has entered its next exciting phase, Diamonds shooter Caitlin Bassett logging an international best 52 goals in Australia's 60-55 win over New Zealand in Melbourne.
If the question is which tenacious blonde Queensland Firebirds triple-premiership defender has captained the Diamonds with distinction this year, the answer is not the one you might think. No, not the feted and decorated Laura Geitz, but her lower-profile teammate and close friend Clare McMeniman.
Lisa Alexander, maths teacher, is wary of using numbers to measure sporting performance. But Lisa Alexander, Australian Diamonds head coach, estimates the amount of improvement needed to beat New Zealand in Sunday's inaugural Quad Series decider is a minimum of 20 per cent.
Search pagination