Netballers can't swim in Caribbean puddle

By Orville Higgins

A few days ago, Marva Bernard, Jamaica's netball boss, made a statement to the effect that the national Under-16s competing in the regional age-group tournament is not helping the teams development and she may well be searching for options. I am paraphrasing, but the sentiments are similar.

The statement has attracted some criticism from several quarters, who feel Marva's statement was a little too anti-Caribbean. Those who are of that mindset believe Marva Bernard should be concerned not only with Jamaica's progress, but with the development of the region as well. I beg to disagree.

Marva Bernard's job is to develop Jamaica's netball, not to raise the standards of the regional game. If she is the president of some regional body, that's different, but otherwise helping the regional game should not be her primary concern, and certainly not to the detriment of her team.

Let us take a look at the scores in the just-concluded tournament. We beat Trinidad and Tobago 51-2. That was just embarrassing. That wasn't a game. That was not even a proper training session. That was one team playing and the other apparently just learning the game. Against Barbados, we won 38-21. It was a blowout. In any netball game, an 18-point win is a huge margin, but it was the closest that any team competed with Jamaica.

Against St Vincent and the Grenadines, we romped home 68-13. Again, another complete mismatch. Versus Dominica, we finished the game 55-14. St Lucia fared much worse, losing 53-5. Against St Kitts, we were leading 20-5 at half-time, until St Kitts did their version of no mas and didn't even bother to finish the game.

This years dominance is pretty much par for the course for the Jamaicans. This regional Under-16 tournament started in 1998, and Jamaica has won every year they have entered, except once. Despite this dominance, the Jamaicans are yet to win a global senior title, or even an Under-21 world title, and therefore it is clear that what we do in the Caribbean Under-16 competition doesn't exactly prepare us for netball at the other levels.

How did that tournament help the Jamaica Under-16 netball team to be a better team? They would have learnt more, and gained far better match experience, by playing against any of Jamaica's top teams. That said, national junior players have to learn about some of the challenges that come with playing international games. The flying, the sleeping in strange hotels, the ability to adjust to different conditions, including crowd and food and weather, are all crucial to their development. All of that they would get from going to a Caribbean tournament in another country. Those advantages, however, were taken away when the games themselves became one-sided, boring affairs.

If Marva Bernard can find somewhere else to send the girls during the time of the tournament, where the competition is proper, then I am all for it. Where that alternative is, I don't know. It could be to send them to any of the top teams to play against age-group club teams. If we can't find the money to send them away, maybe we could well go the route of having a national Under-16 team competing in our top netball league. That may carry its own logistics and even financial challenges, but the benefits to the team would be far greater than going away to beat Trinidad 51-2.

One of the things our national senior team lacks when it takes part in the World Championships or Commonwealth Games is killer instinct. We compete for a while at the start of the game, but lack that energy, that fighting spirit, that oomph, as we go down the stretch against the top teams. I'm prepared to say that one of the reasons for that is because our girls, in their formative years, were not exposed to high-level competition, where the intensity is great and the games are close.

The Caribbean Under-16 tournament is, therefore, not helping us and may well be doing more harm than good. It could well lull the girls into a false sense of their own abilities. So if Marva Bernard can get us competition somewhere else, let us support her. Staying in the Caribbean merely to support our neighbours is proving to be counterproductive.

Orville Higgins is a sportscaster with KLAS ESPN FM. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.