Without accurate passing, it would be a struggle to move the ball forward to the goal circle. Poor passing risks turnovers and is the single biggest factor in losing a game.
Once your netball season is under way, after about four rounds you should be approaching match fitness along with improvement in your training drills and general fitness.
However, with all the excitement of a new season it is easy to lose sight of the fundamental structure of the game – passing the ball. It is natural when you are playing at your best to relax your training intensity and to become a little casual. It only takes a few weeks without constant practice for your skills to deteriorate.
Coaches and fitness trainers can sometimes become side tracked by constantly trying to find new and better drills to improve player performance and the basics are being neglected.
Muscle Memory:
It’s important to note that your physical skills, such as passing, goal shooting, hand and eye coordination drills are logged into your brain through “muscle memory” and if you stop practicing your brain will stop logging the information.
Stop passing the ball in training and your brain will think you no longer require this skill and concentrate on your more recent activities.
Passing is fundamental to netball:
The core fundamental skill of a chosen sport must be practiced constantly. In road racing (cycling) it is spinning the pedals and in netball it is passing. Please don’t slacken off with your passing drills – it’s a priority drill.
You can always tell if a player or a team has neglected their passing practice. She starts to look ordinary on court, losing fluency then runs through the team. With poor passing skills, teams will start losing games.
Like a goal shooter, who must constantly practice to maintain a high shooting percentage, the same also applies to every player to constantly practice passing to maintain accuracy and thus keeping the game flowing through to the goal shooters.
Through lack of passing practice several problems arise:
You can see a trend starting to develop with complete team breakdown all because of poor passing skills.
Watch a team, club or state level where the players don’t misjudge their passes and you will be looking at a team which will go from strength to strength as the season progresses. This team would be hard pressed not to find themselves in the finals.
How to pass:
Passing accurately and strongly with sticky fingers is easy. You practice a lot! That’s it. Drills don’t make you better but consistency of practice week in week out does.
Full details in how to take your court skills to your highest performance level, especially in how to pass training by yourself, is detailed in the Netball Fitness & skills ebook. You can check it out at NetballFitness.com website.