The standing-down of Silver Ferns coach Dame Noeline Taurua is without question one of the most staggering decisions in netball history.
To remove a head coach on the eve of an international series, let alone the most successful head coach ever to lead New Zealand, less than two weeks out from the Taini Jamison Trophy and a month out from the Constellation Cup against Australia, is simply mind-blowing.
Let’s not forget that her last international result was the lifting of the Constellation Cup after a 3-1 series win against Australia less than 12 months ago.
Depending on which news source you read, unrest amongst a group of New Zealand players is believed to have led to the decision, stemming back to a training camp earlier this year in which the Ferns recorded two heavy losses against the New South Wales Swifts, with Netball New Zealand only now taking action while suggesting there are currently issues preventing the program from being a high performance environment.
We once penned an article on being wary of your netball club’s vocal minority, and in ‘club land’ we see it happen almost weekly – a player or parent isn’t happy with court time, or positions, or selections, or an aspect of training, so they make a complaint to the club, and rather than the club’s default setting being to ensure it first supports the coach it has appointed, it instead rushes to take action to appease the complainants.
Instead of having faith and backing the coach to conduct the program they’ve been put in place to run, the fear of losing a couple of players wins out and the coach is the first one to fall on the sword.
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Yet rarely do we see these same types of issues play out so dramatically at a national level.
There have long been rumblings about some players being unhappy about (and missing selection because of) Taurua’s fitness demands, in particular her requirement for Silver Ferns players to achieve a yoyo test result of 16.3.
For those unfamiliar with this test, reaching level 16.3 should not be a difficult task for a paid professional athlete in a national team. Scores above 16 are what you would expect for most players in under-age state teams, while scores in the 17s and 18s are often achieved by players at state league level, let alone national teams.
While there is surely more to this story than fitness standards, it does speak to a wider issue of player power when it comes to the operation of professional teams in modern sport.
The chorus of Silver Ferns legends speaking out in Taurua’s defence also speaks volumes. None of them can reconcile this week’s events with their own experiences of ‘Aunty Noels’ as a coach and leader who shaped them as people and continually found a way to get the best out of them, while bringing the national team back from obscurity.
If social media comments on yesterday’s news stories are any guide, most netball fans are squarely in Taurua’s corner.
How the Silver Ferns come back from this and forge a path forward is anyone’s guess. By standing Taurua down, the organisation has sent a message that the players can now wield power if and when they choose, and shape major decisions around the composition of the national team.
Let’s hope some truth and clarity emerges in the coming days to help us understand how it all came to this.
