NETBALL SOUTH AFRICA ANNOUNCES NEW NATIONAL COACH

Pretoria - Netball South Africa (NSA) announced the appointment on Saturday of Carin Strauss as the new head coach to take the SPAR national netball team through to the World Netball Championships in Singapore in 2011. South Africa finished in sixth place at the World Championships in New Zealand last year, and Strauss will be expected to take the team to a higher position in Singapore.

However, after South Africa finished behind Malawi at both the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games Melbourne in 2006, Strauss’s first priority will be to re-establish South Africa’s dominance in Africa. Her next major international competition will be the Commonwealth Games in India in 2010.

Strauss’s appointment was the culmination of a lengthy evaluation process, with NSA assisted by former New Zealand national coach Lynn Gunson, who is a member of the International Coaches Committee. The new coach has a proven track record, having coached Gauteng North, the national Under-21 team and the Thunderbirds.

“NSA is confident in their decision with the appointment of Carin Strauss as the new head coach and we look forward to working with, assisting and supporting her over the next few years. We wish her well in her new position”, said NSA President Mimi Mthethwa.

“There is a lot of hard work ahead,” said Strauss. “We plan to hold a number of decentralised training camps around the country, aimed at identifying new talent. Some of the senior players will have retired by 2011, and so we need to start finding replacements right now. We shall also be using referrals as a means of identifying players, so that coaches can contact us to identify possible members of the national training squad.”

NSA also announced plans to improve the standard of coaching at all levels in South Africa. At least twenty promising coaches are to undergo intensive training to prepare them to coach at a higher level. The most successful will be appointed to assist Strauss in her task.

“Once they have been through the training, they will be expected to be ‘buddies’ to other coaches,” explained Strauss. “I’m also going to have a buddy – Lynn Gunson will be helping and mentoring me so that I can turn the Proteas into a really competitive team. She has been doing some work with the coaches in South Africa, and she has already gone a long way to changing our mindset.”