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Government’s $265m sport relief fund will allow netball to restart at all levels, Netball NZ boss says

May 18, 2020

Jennie Wyllie said there are three tranches of money in the funding.

The Government’s $265 million relief fund for sport will allow netball to restart at all levels, Netball NZ boss Jennie Wyllie says.

The package, which was announced yesterday, would benefit the sport from the elite level down to community sport, Wyllie told TVNZ1's Breakfast today.

“We shut the doors at Level 4, which was devastating. Netball has hundreds of thousands coming over the threshold every year,” she said.

“We were in a place where our funding was drying up, our trust funding. We were being challenged in terms of our elite product. We couldn’t put the girls out on court.

“So it was a really difficult time, which is going to make a significant impact on the sector.”

Wyllie said they would work with Sport NZ on the funding, under which there were three tranches of money, and she was looking forward to how the funding was rolled out.

“It is going to be impactful, but I do think we have the opportunity with this relief package to restart our sport,” she said.

“That’s the important part, to be able to stand ourselves back up and provide those participation opportunities.”

Wyllie said it was an extremely difficult decision to cancel the secondary school regional national tournaments but said the focus was now on making sure kids feel safe returning to netball so they could “see that ability to play the game for life”.

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