JNA unveils ambitious five-year plan
MAKING Jamaica one of the top two netball-playing countries in the world and winning the senior world title are among the goals of the Jamaica Netball Association (JNA) over the next five years.
“We’re looking at how we’re structured and what we’re going to have to do to give better performances at the Commonwealth Games and certainly the World Championships,” president Marva Bernard told the Observer.
The local governing body laid down the frame work for its five-year plan at a weekend retreat facilitated by motivational speaker Nsombi Jaja at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel.
“The final document is not going to ready yet because it’s a process, but we’ve put a stake in the ground and we have some timelines, and once we get back the report from the retreat we can see where the gaps are,” Bernard said.
For the National Under-21 team, which claimed bronze at the last World Youth Championships (WYNC) in the Cook Islands, to improve their ranking at the event is another major goal, Bernard said.
“We believe that we can win all of these championships if we just put certain things in place.”
She added that there were also plans to help form parish associations outside of Kingston and St Andrew “… because right now they’re not as many as we would like to have to help grow the game”.
Meanwhile, big plans are afoot to stage ‘FASTNET’ competition locally, preferably sometime in July, before the Sunshine Girls head to Australia for a Test series.
The first FASTNET World Series was staged in Manchester, England, in September last year, with Jamaica finishing second behind New Zealand in the shorter, faster version of
the game.
“It has to be something that we’d have to shuffle up clubs …the details have not been worked out as yet, but we just know it’s not six clubs that are going to be playing; we’re going to shuffle the deck,” Bernard told the Observer”
Netball has struggled for years to gain the recognition and sponsorship in alignment with the teams’ performances on the regional and international stage, and Bernard said high on the agenda would be finally attracting the kind of financial support necessary for the sport.
As for the five-year plan, Bernard said everything so far was a work in progress.
“This is not something that’s going to be completed in one weekend, but it’s a huge start,” she said.
