Participants take part in the Back to Netball and Walking Netball session
The year 2016 has been full of netball growth and really one to shout about for England Netball’s development department.
Participation through the roof!
Participation is at an all-time high with 180,200 people playing netball! With the success of campaigns such as Walking Netball and Back to Netball, the sport has seen an increase of 25,400 (16.4%) on the same period last year.
What a great team effort from staff and volunteers alike to make sure all these people have the opportunity to participate in our wonderful sport!
England Netball has run a staggering 1988 programmes across the country during 2016 attracting 53,819 people along the way – even more impressively, 24,886 of these had not played netball in the last year.
Why do you TeamUp?!
Paving the way for women in sport is TeamUp – officially launched in October, this is an initiative to inspire women and girls at a unique moment in time; 3 women’s world cups in England in 3 consecutive years.
Starting in 2017, England Netball, The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and England Hockey are hosting home world cups – what better time to get people talking about women’s sport?!
The TeamUp project involves working with schools to increase the quantity and quality of delivery of team sports to girls and we already have nearly 700 schools signed up across the UK!
Junior growth!
This year, we’ve also seen an amazing 224 new junior clubs created and of these, 82 are brand new clubs!
A further 75 clubs added a new section and 67 are run by clubs who established themselves at a new venue to spread the love – meaning even more young people are accessing regular netball activity.
Through this club set up, 4725 young people have taken part in netball and the majority are now affiliated members – fantastic news for all you budding Roses out there!
We’ve also been reaching lots of young netballers this year with almost 4000 young people participating through Premier League for Sport.
Competition is important to many of our participants, not least those at schools, and netball was involved in 64 county final events with 669 teams involved in this stage alone.
The majority were High 5 competitions, but just under a third were for secondary school students!
CAPS off to you!
In 2016, a staggering 336 clubs became CAPS accredited – these levels have been maintained and of these clubs a brilliant 23 are accredited to the highest level which is Gold.
The CAPS system has also been updated and after years of having to complete a massive folder, CAPS has gone online! Hopefully this will make things easier for both clubs and staff! Take a look at the newest version of CAPS here.
Focus on volunteers…
Also during this year a brand new workshop for clubs has been piloted – it is a workshop like no other and looks to focus club volunteers’ attention on the experience they provide and how they can really cater for the motivations and needs of those that come along.
These workshops are now attracting more volunteers and the comments from all those that attended have been positive with some real lightbulb moments experienced.
Higher education and beyond!
Netball continues to be delivered in colleges with 1993 college students engaging in our programmes. They experienced a wide variety of opportunities from Netball Now to establishing a college team – amazingly around half of these were not previously playing netball!
Want to learn more about this? You can!
What a year for our fabulous sport! Long may this continue into 2017 and beyond…
