Omega Otters, a paranetball group whose training sessions are funded by Herts County Netball and Omega netball club, have finished their Autumn 2023 term. Here’s an end of term report from Rebecca, their friend and coach.
“Our third winter term draws to a close and for the first time since we restarted after Covid, we were able to have a proper Christmas party session to finish! Our last sessions in 2021 and 2022 were cancelled at short notice due to a Covid resurgence and the snow respectively, so it was great to finally have a chance to get out the Christmas netballs and see everyone in their favourite Christmas jumpers or hats. We played a special Christmas shooting game which I use with my Back to Netball and Walking Netball sessions where you earn paper “baubles” to stick onto a Christmas tree (drawn on flip chart paper and stuck up on the wall near the post!). We dropped a bit of the competitive side – usually each team has their own tree and the winning team is the one with the most baubles; we just had one tree and the two teams worked together to fill all the slots with baubles – but they still got incredibly excited and we had to play it a second time.
Attendance has been reasonable this term, with numbers at each session ranging from 7 – 11. As well as occasional help from our Walking Netball volunteers when our assistant coach has been unavailable, we have been joined a couple of times by a netballer dealing with a physical disability who takes part in the activities and games as well as lending a hand when needed.
As well as revisiting several of our favourite drills and exercises such as caterpillar and the change of direction exercise we worked on last term, we spent a few weeks learning ‘three ball drill’ on weeks when we had enough volunteers to take the feeder roles and we were pleasantly surprised at how quickly some of them picked up the pattern of passing and moving; some of the more able athletes were helping the ones who need more prompting as well by telling them who to go towards for the next pass. We also introduced a new shooting game – again, one I use at B2N/WN – where the group splits into two teams and the coach rolls a large foam die and each team tries to score the number of goals displayed, with the first team to do so winning a point for that round. Each team had a volunteer with them to help them keep count of how many they had scored. It was a very close game and they enjoyed seeing the die rolling and wondering when it would stop! We had to replace our session netballs after the stitching failed on one, and took the opportunity to pick up a size 1 netball that we have used to help develop and improve catching skills.
Thank you again for all your support of the session; we really appreciate the help towards the costs that keeps the session viable even on quieter weeks.
Rebecca Matley and all at Omega Otters”
