Steel up and running in 2017
The Ascot Park Hotel Southern Steel launched into its 2017 pre-season campaign in Invercargill today.
The bulk of the squad gathered at ILT Stadium Southland to kick start preparations for the inaugural ANZ Premiership.
Absent were young guns Jamie Hume, Abby Erwood and Jennifer O’Connell who are presently on tour in Fiji with the NZ U21 squad, while Jamaican international Jhaniele Fowler-Reid will link up with her Steel team-mates in early February.
Coach Reinga Bloxham was eager to get the season underway.
“I’ve been looking forward to this all Christmas,” she said.
“It’s awesome and I think the players are really ready to come in and get started.
“They are really pumped, excited and fresh. They’ve had a little break over Christmas which was good but now they are raring to get into it.”
Silver Ferns Shannon Francois, Te Paea Selby-Rickit, Jane Watson and Gina Crampton had a hectic schedule of representative commitments heading into the holiday season but Bloxham expected Steel to reap the rewards.
“Because they’ve had those commitments prior, they are coming in and hitting the ground running which is great.”
With a gruelling pre-season schedule looming, the intensity would be there from the outset to best prepare the team for the rigors of the ANZ Premiership, which features double headers and mid-week matches.
“Our plan is to just absolutely hammer them and smash them as much as we can because this new competition is just an unknown. There’s such a quick turnaround between games that we need to be fitter, faster, stronger than we’ve ever been,” Bloxham said.
“We’ve done a lot of our preseason planning around the match schedule and how we can cope with the fatigue and best back up our performance again.
“This new competition is just so exciting. The great thing is that it forces people to use their whole team and their bench and be quite strategic and tactical about what they’re doing on the court.”
The Steel’s opening ANZ Premiership game is against the Northern Stars in Hamilton on March 26 – the first of three Super Sundays featuring all six teams competing at the same venue.