“Have you got your starting seven?”
If you're a netball coach on a matchday, you'll have been asked that question. Sometimes you've known the answer for days; you've watched training, thought about the opposition, played combinations around in your head and arrived at the venue confident about what you're going to do.
“Have you got your starting seven?”
And suddenly, for no particularly rational reason, the seven you were perfectly happy with five minutes ago can feel just a little less certain. Because now you have to write it down - seven names in seven boxes and, once it's on the sheet, that's your starting seven. You've stopped thinking about a decision - you've made one.
Of course, there is an apparently simple answer to all of this - just pick your best seven. Except I'm not sure I've ever found selection quite that straightforward, because before I can pick my best seven, there's another question I need to answer.
Best for what?
Because “best seven” makes it sound as though there is an absolute ranking somewhere. Put all your players in order, take the top seven, hand out the bibs and off you go. Except netball doesn't really work like that - you could have the most amazing shooter in the world, but if your midcourt can't get them the ball, they can't score. Seven individually brilliant players don't automatically make the best team.
People play differently - one player might play beautiful, patient, pretty netball while another is a bulldozer who goes full gas at high speed. One might win you ball in crucial moments, and another might never make a mistake. Neither of those things automatically makes one player better than the other. It asks a different question: what do you want? And what do you give up by choosing one thing over another?
You need people who work together, complement each other, understand each other and, ideally, don't annoy the crap out of each other after two minutes. Timing matters, trust matters, the way one player creates space for another matters. Sometimes the player with the most obvious individual strengths isn't the player who makes the people around them work best.
And none of that takes into account the people on the other side of the court.
My beautiful, patient netballer might come up against someone who just gives them a little knock every now and again and rattles them enough to throw them off their game. A player can be fast and aerial, but put them against someone who’s big and strong and who drags them into push and shove on the circle edge, and suddenly the game is taking them away from the things they’re good at. They haven’t stopped being fast or aerial; those strengths haven't disappeared, but this game might not be allowing them to use them in the same way.
Then we have the player who might start brilliantly, but the game they played yesterday catches up with them before the first quarter is out. Now what matters more: fresh legs or netball smarts? And, just when you think you've thought through all of that, the other team only goes and changes their seven too.
Also, the right seven last week aren't automatically the right seven this week. The right seven at the first whistle aren't automatically the right seven at half-time. ‘Best’ isn't a fixed quality that belongs to seven particular people - it depends on what this game is asking of them.
Which is why I've started to think of a starting seven less as an answer and more as an opening gambit.
You have to start somewhere. You take what you've seen in training, what you know about your players, what you know about the opposition and what you're trying to achieve, and you put seven people on court. Then the whistle goes, and the game starts giving you information you didn't have when you filled in the sheet.
That doesn't mean reacting to every missed shot or lost centre pass. A shooter might miss one shot and turn and shoot the next one without hesitation. A defender might not get the interception, but they might put enough pressure on the ball to cause the mistake somewhere else. A team can be a little up or a little down on the scoreboard and still very clearly be in the game.
For me, “we're in this” usually means there isn't one area of the court where we're being consistently outperformed. People are communicating, they're figuring things out between themselves, heads stay high, they fight for the 50/50 balls, they're answering some of the questions the opposition is asking while continuing to ask questions of their own. If you know you're in it, the players flipping well do too.
So sometimes the right thing is to do nothing. Give the combination enough time to settle, enough time to get beyond first-minute nerves, enough time to see patterns rather than isolated mistakes. But you can’t slip from where “giving them a chance” becomes watching the same problem happen again and again while the players are practically looking at the bench saying, you need to bloody change something because this isn't working.
Refusing to change isn’t a badge of honour; you don’t get extra points for backing your players, regardless. Sometimes keeping people out there is you continuing to ask a question they can’t answer. You’re just asking people to work harder or be better when what they actually need is a different combination, a different match-up, fresh legs, or a moment on the bench so they can see what’s going on. Equally, making a change doesn't automatically mean your starting seven was wrong - the game has changed, you know more now than you did when you wrote those seven names down.
And the game isn't the only thing that changes. People do too.
One player might have taped her ankle a bit too tightly, and it feels weird; another might be on her period or have a blister. Another might know they have to leave the second the final whistle goes because they need to get to work. Those are the little things before you even get to the big stuff - someone starting university, failing exams, moving house, going for a promotion, getting divorced, worrying about someone they love or floating into training because they've just been on the best date of their life.
Because remember - this is amateur sport. We're not professionals, and nobody is under an obligation to do this. We do it because we love it, because we get something from it, because being part of a team or a club or simply playing the sport matters to us. But it is never the only thing we have.
Which is why “leave it at the door” sounds like a lovely idea, and sometimes netball genuinely is the place where someone wants to leave everything else outside for an hour or two. But it can also become a convenient way for a coach to say - I don't want to consider anything else that might be happening to you; just go out there and perform.
We don't get to detach the netball player from the person and only coach the convenient bit. At the same time, knowing someone's backstory doesn't make the selection decision for you.
It’s never ‘oh, this player’s having a tough time so let's start them’ but it could be ‘let's give them the opportunity to be here, understand what that might mean, and see if they’re up for it.’ And so sometimes being asked “have you got your starting seven?” feels difficult because you're still watching people warm up. You might have arrived with a very good idea of what you're going to do, but you're still looking at the people who are actually in front of you today.
And once someone says, yes, I'm here, and I want to play, I think you owe them fair treatment. Big them up for the good stuff and hold them accountable for the less good stuff. That might mean taking them off. This is a team sport. One player shouldn't have to suffer because keeping another on might perk them up. Player A shouldn't have to come off simply because putting Player B on would make them happy. You can know the backstory and care about it deeply, but you still have to coach what is in front of you. Because you owe that to everyone.
Person-centred coaching doesn't mean one person's needs become more important than everybody else's. Context is information - it can help you understand what you're seeing, change a conversation, give someone an opportunity or make you look again. It doesn't automatically tell you who gets the bib.
And, of course, you aren't the only person who sees stuff.
A player might disagree with your seven, and they might have a point. They are standing somewhere you aren't. They feel combinations from inside them. They may know something you don't or have seen something you've missed. Sitting in The Chair doesn't turn everybody else's knowledge off.
So listen to them. And I mean properly listen, not stand in front of them nodding while you're actually thinking about what you're going to say next. Listen fully so that you can understand another point of view and allow what they tell you to enter your thinking. It might change your mind. It might not.
A player can have a valuable view without having all the information you have; you might know something about another player that you cannot share, or you might be thinking about something they haven't considered… All of those things can be true at the same time, but ultimately, the decision is still yours. You owe them attention. You don't owe them an outcome.
So perhaps ‘best seven’ isn't really about identifying your seven best players at all. It's about choosing the seven you believe are best to put on court right now, from the people actually available to you, to get this particular game moving in the direction you want it to go.
And you're trying to do a lot with those seven names. You want to win, you want to perform, you want people to develop. You want combinations to grow, and you might want to get far enough ahead that you can give a less experienced player meaningful court time without asking them to enter a one-goal game with four minutes left and save netball civilisation. You might be protecting someone carrying a niggle because, while you need them today, you would quite like to have them for the rest of the season too.
Sometimes those things work together. Your strongest starting combination might build the lead that creates developmental opportunity later. Giving someone an opportunity now might help create the player you'll need in three months. Sometimes they pull in completely different directions.
And none of that- none of what you know, what you’re trying to achieve or what you’ve had to consider - ever gets an asterisk next to the result.
The table will simply show a win or a loss and a score. It won't tell anyone that you gave a new player court time because it matters for their development, or that you rested someone because of a niggle, or that three players weren't available because they have jobs, university, families, colds, holidays and lives. It won't tell them that you were five goals up while feeling as though you were hanging on by your fingernails.
But winning doesn't prove you picked the right seven either. A win can make it very easy to forget the bit in the second quarter where you lost three centre passes in a row because the other team happened to lose more than you did. A loss doesn't require self-flagellation and an ‘I let you down’ post-mortem, and a win doesn't always require champagne.
For me, you know you're onto something when players can still be thoughtful and analytical about their performance, whatever the scoreboard says. When they can recognise what worked, what didn't and what they need to look at next without allowing two numbers to do all of the thinking for them. When they're accountable to themselves for the performance that never shows on the scoreboard. Win or lose.
Because the result matters. Of course it does. But it can't tell you everything about the decisions that produced it.
Which brings us back to the team sheet…
“Have you got your starting seven?”
Same question, but perhaps it means something slightly different now.
You are not being asked to identify the seven objectively best netball players in your squad and declare the problem solved. You're being asked where you want to start.
Given the people available to you, the opposition, the combinations, what you've seen, what you know, what you don't know and what you're trying to achieve, who do you believe are the best seven to put on court right now?
Another coach might look at the same information and choose differently. You might know more tomorrow and choose differently yourself. That doesn't remove your responsibility to decide today.
So you write the names down. Seven names for seven boxes. The sheet goes in. The whistle goes.
It's not seven, so you’re done. It's seven, and so it begins.
