Netball Clinics @ Gene Louw

BECOME THE BEST YOU CAN BE

Ultimate Coaching will be hosting netball coaching sessions at Gene Louw Primary as soon as both government and Netball South Africa’s Covid19 regulations allow for it.

Training sessions will be age and developmental stage appropriate.

All sessions will be led by Francois Nel, the director of coaching at Ultimate Coaching.

The number of athletes per session will also be limited. Ultimate Coaching aims to expose all attendees to maximum input from the coach and or assistant coaches. That is why we have taken the decision to implement the athlete-to-coach ratio of no more than ten athletes to one coach.

Training Guidelines

The intensity of a session will be determined by the weather. Ultimate Coaching follows the hot weather guidelines as set out by Sports Medicine Australia (SMA) and can be read at www.sport.unimelb.edu.au/images/ClubResources_47_1218144596.pdf

Do practice always “make perfect”?

If you continually practice a specific technique, you will become perfect in executing THAT technique. However, if THE technique is not the most suited to achieve the result, you will not achieve perfection in achieving the result.Thus Ultimate Coaching believes

Perfect Practice makes Perfect

The Ultimate Coaching netball program focuses on developing the most effective techniques to achieve the required results for playing netball.

Winning is the main focus of sport participation in schools, which results in coaches spending most of the time training in the “Training to Win” stage for athlete development and in doing so, do not spend enough time in developing the basic skills required. In sport development we know, that this type of coaching is not conducive in producing top athletes at the senior level. The Ultimate Coaching netball program, aims to address the lack of ”Basic skills development” in the majority of the schools programs.

Catching and Passing Skills

These skills are dependent on numerous basic capabilities of the athlete. Kinaesthetic awareness (also called muscle sense), vision, strength and mobility of joints are just some of the capabilities. For example, a lot of the speed of the travelling ball, as well as its accuracy is determined by the strength and flexibility of the wrist. The flick of the wrist will dictate the speed and path of the thrown ball. The stronger the wrist and the bigger the controlled range of motion- the more momentum can be transferred to the ball. This will allow for a higher quality pass. Vision, especially depth perception, will allow for better judgement of where the ball is to be thrown. Kinaesthetic awareness is the ability to know how much strength to put on the pass, also known as- “weighing the pass”.

Landing and Turning

Due to the nature of the sport, landing is a major component. Since female athletes generally are more susceptible to knee injuries, the program took time to focus on developing landing techniques to reduce the chance of injuries. A section of the program concentrates on strengthening the muscles controlling the hip, knee, and ankle joints. It also incorporates a lot of proprioception development as this has been shown by numerous studies, to have strengthened these joints more effectively than traditional strength training.

Agility

A lot of activities designed to improve the athletes’ multi-directional speed i.e. Agility, are built into this program.

Some techniques, inherent to the human body, have been suppressed – due to several factors playing a role, such as lack of playing discovery games, climbing objects, and incorrect training techniques. A simple movement like the foot plant, can be the difference not only between beating an opponent but also reducing the chance of injuries developed over a long period.