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Farm Cove Intermediate School’s ambitious girls’ netball team earned their school its best ever placing at this year’s Zespri Aims Games. The large intermediate-school sports competition was recently staged in Tauranga. It brought together about 14,000 of the country’s top young athletes from more than 430 schools. They competed in 27 different sporting codes. The Farm Cove Intermediate netball team finished eighth in the Netball Girls Division’s A Grade Finals 1-16. It’s the school’s best finish in netball at the Aims Games. The other top east Auckland team, from Mission Heights Junior College in Flat Bush, finished in second place in the Netball Open Division’s Open Finals 1-16. The Farm Cove team is coached by teacher and experienced netball player Siobhan Matalavea-Booth, who says: “Our goal was to beat the result we had last year, which was top 16. We wanted to get higher than that and we did.” She says the team worked hard to prepare for the competition it was to face at the Aims Games. “Every Thursday morning at 7am the girls would come down to the Farm Cove Intermediate gym and we’d go through training sessions. “We’d teach them different set plays. A lot of our girls have to train in different positions depending on their skillset, which was really good because girls who would normally play in maybe one position would change into another, and that go us to eighth place.” Matalavea-Booth says prior to attending Aims Games her young squad played in an Auckland Intermediate Competition Team in the South Eastern Zone, where it finished first after a close game against rivals Bucklands Beach Intermediate School. “During the [Aims Games] competition our team manager Erin Fowler went above and beyond, cooking up a storm to keep the girls energised and ready to perform at their best throughout the tournament. “The team came eighth out of 122 teams in New Zealand. It’s the best result in the school’s history and the staff and wider school community are so proud of the team’s achievement.” One of the team’s standout players at the Aims Games is humble but talented goal shoot Abre Nahu-Main. She says the hardest part of the competition was staying calm during the games when playing under pressure. “There’s pressure to do your best. If we lost a game we would have gone down. There’s lots of pressure when you’re shooting because if we miss the ball it’s handover. “So we need to be perfect, but no one’s perfect. We were so happy [to finish eighth]. “We blasted the music in the van [afterward] and we were screaming the songs. We made our own cheer and we all did it together.”
