Over the past 96 years, the journey of our sport has had a number of challenges thrown its way, from floods and fires to cyclones and SARS. Throughout each of these challenges, our sport has had to work hard to earn and maintain the respect of our communities, self-fund our own way through, seek to be heard and continue to build a community that is inclusive and founded on our core values of respect, integrity, collaboration, inclusivity and humanity.
This COVID-19 virus has seen our sport face its greatest challenge yet, and it is now our responsibility to demonstrate the resilience, passion, sense of community and caring nature that we’ve built across our journey. If we do, we will not only survive this crisis but thrive, finding new ways to meet our purpose of advancing netball and advancing communities.
In the short term, the reality of the impacts on our sport are significant. On Saturday evening, our Board approved a number of actions that will see us scale back our operations by more than $10 million across Netball in WA.
As part of these cuts, we have today stood down more than 50% of the Netball WA staff, with the remaining staff taking significant reductions in pay over an initial six-week period, which is likely to be extended based on the latest advice. We will also be reducing our organisation’s operations to four days a week, operating from Monday to Thursday over this period.
Our people define our organisation. They are our family, and this has been an incredibly emotional and difficult period for us all.
Through this pain that we are enduring, we have also taken this moment to consider the opportunity; a chance to reframe our thinking, to ensure we look to innovate in the way we connect across this great state from Esperance to Kununurra and from Albany to Perth.
Sustainability of our competitions and Clubs is critical and our support through the Gold Industry Group will enable us to ensure 50% of the GIG WANL grants are provided to our Clubs to support them through this crisis.
Similarly, the broader support of all our partners, along with the State Government, will ensure that we have community netball staff to support our member associations through this period and to prepare for the competitions when the crisis lifts.
Our Marketing and Communications teams are also working with the West Coast Fever and our Shooting Stars teams to ensure we continue to provide content to our netball members, Suncorp NetSetGO participants, our fans and all of our program participants so we stay connected and continue developing our netball skills as coaches, umpires, volunteers and players.
As a sport across this state, community spirit will see us play a key role in helping our communities lift and get through this period. Our sport will come together through innovation, and through the “netball way” we will play our part.
I’d like to thank our community, our partners and our people for their ongoing commitment, sacrifice and support that will ensure we come through this together and that we’re all back on the court stronger than ever later this year.
Simon Taylor
Chief Executive Officer
Netball WA
