The Shepparton Netball Association season will not begin until at least May 16 after the organisation made the decision on Monday to postpone matches.
Planned registration events for the Saturday morning and afternoon competitions continued last night and will again tonight, but games will not begin for at least two months due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“As per (advice surrounding) non-essential gatherings the SNA are delaying the start of the competition until 16 May,” the association said.
“The committee will revisit this closer to the date if needed.”
It is expected most teams will put training on hold until closer to the new start date of the season, with Tatura Netball Association doing just that.
“The SNA has postponed the start of its season until 16 May, 2020 at the earliest. Consequently, all TNA SNA teams — morning and afternoon — will postpone training until the week commencing 13 April, 2020,” it said.
“This is the first week after school holidays.
“That means there will be no training this week.
“Importantly, SNA registration will still take place . . . and all teams will be entered.”
Netball Victoria provided an update yesterday stating that it's "recommendation to the Victorian netball community is to suspend competitions until Tuesday, 14 April", which is the end of the school holidays, but supported individual decisions from respective associations.
“Many associations and leagues, both in Victoria and across the rest of the country, are making independent decisions based on their own community feedback,” NV chief executive Rosie King said.
“We encourage this approach to continue, as you know your community better than anybody else does.
“Netball Victoria has supported our community for nearly 100 years; through two World Wars and a Depression and we are going to continue to support our community as we now face this terrible global pandemic; Covid-19.
“We can assure you that the decisions that we make are done so with best intentions and with the most up to date information that is available to us.
“Netball has stuck together and continued to support each other and as a result we have survived many challenges; and we know that we will do that again.”
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