Netball Anyone?

Chloe participated in her first Netball game today. It's a game we Schrammels never heard of prior to Chloe joining her school, but apparently it's a popular game for females in many of the Commonwealth nations.

"What is netball?" you may be asking. It's often described as being similar to basketball. However, after researching it online, watching clips of netball games online, seeing it a bit on TV and watching Chloe's game, I think that is over reaching. My impression -- and Peggy shares this with me -- is that besides there being a ball, a thing with a net and players wearing footwear, there are few similarities with the sport we know as basketball. In fact, we would consider netball to be more of an activity, like scrapbooking or gardening. Here is a link to a game played by "advanced" players... by way of comparison, though, let me say that the game played by Chloe and her 7- to 8-year old teammates wasn't disproportionately worse in terms of skill, athleticism or general "sporty-ness," even given this was their first game. But back to Chloe's game...

For her first kick at this can (read: playing a game she wasn't so familiar with and only practiced once a week for a couple of weeks,) Chloe played well in her position of Goalkeeper. She prevented several passes from reaching the other team's Goalscorer and made some timely passes to try and get the ball up court. Unfortunately, her teammates were keen on passing the ball "east-west" and not "north-south" and inevitably the action came back into Chloe's area of action. Final score: 10-ish to 1.