I received a message from an old friend tonight out of the blue.  He lives in Adelaide, and is an exceptional hockey coach and leader, and whilst I don’t think he gives two shits about Netball, he wrote to me asking  about the Pythons (big fan of the Pythons blog).  He asked how we are tracking for the new season, and we spoke at  length about what makes the Pythons so good. It was interesting to be forced to try and articulate what makes us as good as we are. I will pen a blog about this one day – its quite interesting. 

I guess it’s as good-a-time as any to sum up what we’ve been up to. Two weeks ago we won our 5th straight flag. We played the RC Cobras in the finals and demolished them by 24 – 4.

I video streamed the game live on social media and had 78 watchers which was pretty cool. I think probably only some family from overseas watched for more than 2 minutes, but that doesn’t matter.

We finished the season undefeated both in the regular season and finals, with a perfect 17-0 wins-defeats. The first team to go undefeated in the professional era of Ryan’s Reserve Netball. At the time of print, the most recent time that RC Pythons tasted defeat was 177 days ago, on October 15th 2015.

Official Stats from the Summer Season Grand Final

Crowd Figure: 22

Shooting:

Amanda Langerak – 13 from 17

Amanda Parker – 4 from 6

Laura Hindson – 7 from 14

Amanda Parker was named Best on Ground in the Grand Final, amassing 15 votes (5 x 3). This was made even more special by the fact that she only played 3 quarters (I subbed her for a quarter) and she also spent 2 quarters playing Goal Defence – her regular position being Goal Shooter.

Kudos also goes to Alanna Dunne who polled second (14 votes) and Amanda Langerak who polled third (10 votes) in the Grand Final.

The Sandy Robertson Medal (for the Python’s best and fairest) will be presented at a Python’s event next Sunday 17th April. Immediately following this presentation event the Pythons Summer 2016 stats will be available via malchieb.com

One little tidbit I can give you ahead of time, is that our top shooting percentage for the Summer season went to Fed Kaso. Fed stepped into the shooting circle only once this season and landed 6 goals from 6 attempts – shooting at 100% accuracy.

Finally, the Pythons have decided as playing group that this season we’re going to mix things up. By Sunday of each week, we know who is available to play on the upcoming Thursday match. With the help of random.org’s List Randomiser  (https://www.random.org/lists/) we select our positions at random every week.

As the list outputs, correlates to your position for the week as follows.

1.       GS
2.       GA
3.       WA
4.       C
5.      WD
6.      GD
7.      GK
8.      Sub

The team and coach combined have agreed that one of this season’s goals is to continue to improve as netballers. Experiencing the game from another point of view and position on the court is important in this development. Whilst there was some initial resistance from some team members (primarily around the “OMG WHAT IF WE LOSE” scenario), but we seem to have the buy in now, even if we lose a few games along the way.