WEDNESDAY NIGHT OUT

“This court work session is a lot of running through the team we’re coming up against, how they play. Our attackers will pretend to be the team we’re playing next and the defenders have to try and beat us and then vice-versa. Say we’re playing a New Zealand team, the defenders put on a specific type of zone and we’ll have to try and break it.

So there’s a lot of stopping, starting and talking through the specifics of how we’re going to beat this team and how they play.

“Because there’s a lot of talking, our trainer is around and runs us through what we call top-ups. We’ll finish doing our netball stuff in groups, then each row will have a 15-minute block, and then it’ll be like, ‘Alright, let’s go and do a fitness component.’ It’s either shuttles or runs outside the court on the massive hill ... We’ll do 15 sets of hill runs, so we’re literally fatiguing, and then we come back in and usually do ten to 15 long-courts, where you’ve got seven girls on the court and you bring it from the defence end, to the attacking end, to the goal. You’ve just done fitness, you’ve done a top-up, you’re absolutely buggered, and then you have to go and complete these long-courts!”

KNEEDY THURSDAY

“I make sure I go to physio on Thursday. I’ll do 20 minutes of pilates with him as well. He just watches it and tells me what I need to be focussing on. It’s not like the pilates that I guess people go and do in classes. It’s specific to what my body needs. My hip-alignment needs to be perfect. I have to make sure they’re activated and switched on for me to get the most out of my knees without them hurting. If my hip’s out, my knee hurts. If my glute isn’t switching on properly, my knee will hurt. Just little things like that.

Depending on how I feel, I might do a boxing session on Thursday as well.”

FINALISING FRIDAY

“This is our final court work session leading into a game. It’s pretty much a combined session of what we do on a Monday and Wednesday. It’s a full two hours of hard yakka. We like to have a team word every week that’s going to be our trigger word on the court. In a recent game against the Swifts, our word was ‘hunger’. We were out there, hungry for it, we were going to be the first person there to dropped balls no matter what ... We were literally going to be so dominant, hungry out there and we wanted it so badly ... We could feel it within the team. So on the Friday we’ll focus on our little goals and what we want to work on in our units. The shooters will suggest five goals they want to achieve, then centre court, then defence, and then we talk about what we need to do as a whole to win.”