Netball Center Player: Skills, Weaknesses, and Training
Netball Center Player Performance Analysis
Strengths
This keeps her focused, giving her the advantage to analyze and apply the correct skills suited to the circumstance (bounce pass a defender, find a free space) to successfully outwit her opponents. She demonstrates this by mainly using bounce passes when she notices that her opponent is quite tall and uses overhead passes when her opponent is short.
As a center, W has the perfect endurance level and muscle strength, as she is required in all three thirds of the court. This means she is working at a steady rate and she will not get fatigued throughout the game, so she has the ability to exercise over a long period of time without tiring or losing effectiveness. Likewise, her muscle strength permits her to jump higher to reach and intercept an oncoming pass or receive the pass.
W also has good balance and coordination. This means her passes are more accurate, so she is able to perform a running pass which can keep the game moving and make it hard for her defender to keep up with her. Additionally, balance is an essential and important component which W uses to receive a pass whilst running and also landing with the correct footwork.
Weaknesses
W’s main weakness is reaction time; this is the only thing that lets her down as she has the endurance level and coordination to carry out efficient passes and running. Reaction time is also the reason why she lacks agility because it takes her time to react and respond to a player’s action, this delays agility. This is a main disadvantage as she has not got the full ability to change direction quick enough to still keep control of the body, such as dodging to escape her marker.
What’s more, W has to improve on her tactics as she does not keep running directly towards the ball as it’s being passed at her, instead she stops at a distance she thinks is appropriate to receive the ball and she waits for the ball to fall into her hands. This gives W’s defender a chance to intercept the ball with ease as there is a gap between the ball being passed and W’s hands.
Also, W’s technique fails at times due to her competitiveness. When she is too competitive she becomes aggressive, so while intercepting a pass, she contacts other players. This gives the opponents a direct free pass which can be a big loss in a tournament when matches are often shorter.
Improvement Plan
As reaction time is a main weakness for W and it’s also a key component of fitness in netball, I’ve chosen this to be improved. The reason I chose to develop reaction time instead of agility is because I believe it would help the team more as the lack of agility is due to the fact that it takes her time to respond to stimulus and react to a player’s action which delays her agility. Therefore, without reaction time, W would fail to intercept passes in time during defending her opponent and would also fail to anticipate when to pass the ball to a player who is running down court. If reaction time was improved she would also be able to diminish another of her weaknesses which is agility which would really benefit the team because as well as being able to perform the above she would also be able to win the toss-up between two players and as she is a center she will need a good reaction time just off the whistle at the center.
6-Week Training Program
To improve W’s reaction time, she will have to follow a 6-week circuit training program with exercises focusing on time-reaction as well as other factors that are involved in overall response time: strength, agility, and coordination. W will conduct a warm-up at the start of each session and a cool-down at the end of the session to prevent injury and fatigue. The stations she will include will be:
- Alternate dumbbell punching
- Coach standing at a distance, in front drops a ball from shoulder height and W sprints and catches the ball before its second bounce
- Squat thrust
- W lies on her back, the coach blows a whistle and she must sprint to where he’s positioned
- Hopscotch drill (ladder drill)
- Backward lunge on wobble board with a medicine ball twist
- Clapping push-ups
These will be carried out in the order they’re in.
Progressive Overload
I will apply the requirements of FITT (Frequency, Intensity, Time, Type) to the training program to ensure that W progresses gradually on her improvement and overloads her body to reach a higher level of fitness. The first two weeks W will be working for 20 seconds and recovering for 20 seconds. Every two weeks she will add 20 seconds to the work time and the recovery time. By increasing the time, this will increase frequency as she is performing each station more times. Lastly, intensity will be applied as during W’s sessions, she will raise her heart rate above 60% of her maximum heart rate.
Monitoring Progress
W will monitor her progress by recording the number of repetitions of each exercise and the set time she had to do each of them. She will do this for each session so that she can keep track of the exercise she is capable of doing under a set period of time which will show her whether she’s improving her fitness. Before each session, W should carry out a reaction time test to measure her reaction time. The tests could be by using reaction sticks which are based on the known physical attributes of gravity and they measure your reaction time. The reaction light board test measures reaction time, hand-eye quickness, and coordination and it’s measured by the score of the number of lights that are pressed during the test.