The association’s 13 and under champ side has qualified for Netball Victoria’s Association Championships Finals Day and will battle the best associations in Victoria at the State Netball Centre in Parkville.
The team has been working towards this goal since November, training regularly and participating in the weekly EDNA competitions, as well as battling in several regional tournaments around the region.
That led to the Northern Zone championships on June 15 where the squad, co-coached by Misty Howard and Erica Maddison, won the division and booked its spot among the 12 associations on finals day.
“We played a lot of teams in those preliminary competitions who we’d had quite close games with (previously),” Howard said.
“We came back up against them in the zones, and it was good because we beat some of the teams that we hadn’t beaten before.”
The squad started slowly in wet conditions but was able to regroup over the course of the day, winning its final game to finish with a record of 5-3 and scrape into the finals in fourth spot.
The side matched up in the semi-final against the undefeated top seed, Central Murray FNL, which had defeated EDNA in the first game of the day 8-5, but the local girls had shown plenty of growth since that opener.
“The girls had regrouped and came out very hard,” Maddison said.
“(They) played some absolutely beautiful netball, and I think the other team was just shocked from where they saw us at the start of the day to where they were.”
EDNA took the game 13-7 and continued the trend in the final against Central Victorian Netball Association, turning around a 14-2 defeat in the rounds to win 12-5 and take the title.
The finals day will feature two groups of six sides, with EDNA drawn against Altona NA, Ballarat FNL, Casey NA, Moe and District NA and the Murray League in group two.
The top two sides in each group will progress to the semi-finals, while the remaining sides will battle in sorting matches against equivalent teams from the other group to give every side an overall state ranking.
While winning games is the goal, Howard and Maddison are impressed with what the girls have achieved so far, and how they’ve progressed throughout the season.
“I coached nearly all of these girls in under-11s so to see where they’ve gone from then to now and from the start of the first tournament to this tournament, there’s been some massive change,” Maddison said.
“It’s been a really beautiful group of girls to work with, they all are such team players, there’s no-one out there that’s just wanting to stand out for themselves.
“They're just a great, fun group of girls, and they all want it as well, they want to win at the end.”
Howard highlighted the EDNA pathway, which has built both the girls’ skills and camaraderie throughout their development.
“Eight of the nine of these kids actually have come through the EDNA pathway. So, at least all of them started in the GO program, which is Grade 3 and 4, and some might have even been in the Net Set program,” she said.
“They've gone right through primary school and have done all the development through EDNA.”
Action gets under way at Association Championships Finals Day shortly before 10am, with the group stage concluding around 3.30pm and finals to follow.
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