Performance Coach Development
In 2016 of NCZ’s four ANZ and Central Manawa coaches, only one, Yvette McCausland Durie, had a NNZ coach qualification. In 2023 that has changed and today all our coaches are qualified to or on the PCQ pathway.
We have appointed Anna Andrews to the Pulse Head Coach role for 2024 and we will support her by appointing an Assistant Coach with complementary skills and expertise. We will continue to appoint specialist coaches to work with the Pulse and Central Manawa campaigns in the areas of shooting, mid court and circle defence. Additionally, we will invite guest coaches to add their expertise to our campaigns too.
In the NNL space, we will appoint two Central Manawa Assistant Coaches, one of whom will be based outside Wellington to ensure we spread NNL campaign expertise across the Zone. This will take the number of coaches directly involved in the two Zone campaigns to five, up from four in 2019.
In the Emerging Talent space, we will build a pool of coaches with the game knowledge, experience, capability and desire to step into the ANZ Premiership. We will continue to work closely with NNZ to support the implementation of the PCQ programme, closely supporting a small number of coaches each year to complete the course. And, where we see opportunity, we will seek to identify and fast track high potential coaches into PCQ. To support this work we will re-establish the PCQ coach cohort and work to grow the opportunities available to our next tier of coaches. Each year we will aim to produce 2 new PCQ coaches, offering support in observations, producing personal development plans, communicating with NNZ and offering at least 3 Zone led development opportunities per annum. And we will continue to deploy all our identified coaches into Centre Tournament opportunities and the Advanced Camp.
Accordingly, NCZ will continue to ensure performance coach opportunities are developed and implemented within the NCZ suite of programmes to ensure that we have a surfeit of appropriately skilled home grown coaches for our next recruitment processes.
Zone Selectors
The Zone has appointed a Head of Selectors (HoS) who has been available to help Centres in their selection work. In this four year cycle, we will continue to grow a network of selectors who select and de-select at every level of the Centre representative programmes and who support the Head of Selectors in the zone performance programme.
The role of the selector network will continue to be to give life to the NCZ performance plan by selecting the best athletes into our teams and squads thereby ensuring our squads and teams enjoy the highest levels of success.
Budget permitting, we will strive to have an NCZ selection presence at all national domestic events – age groups, schools and any other events. This will allow us to keep an eye on the movement of our players in and out of our programmes; through our programmes; and in and out of the Zone.
Umpire Development
NCZ has a comprehensive strategy to ensure we continue to dominate the performance umpire space. In 2023 we have 4 International Umpire Award holders, 6 umpires in the national squad, 4 umpires in the national watchlist and 2 national umpire coaches/selectors. To ensure we maintain this level of representation we focus our support on umpires who have potential to be selected for NNZ Open Championships and NNZ U18 Championship by selecting these umpires into two squads. The squads each have an annual programme which is delivered by 5 umpire coaches. The focus of these programmes is based on the 5 Pillars of Performance; Tactical, Technical, Mental, Physical and Management, to develop umpires who have on and off court skills to succeed nationally.
Alongside the umpire programme we have implemented an Emerging Coach programme to ensure we have coaches who have the skills to support our umpires, and to create succession into national coach positions.
NCZ works with centres to create umpire development programmes that will feed umpires into our squads, and to ensure that centres have appropriately qualified umpires for their representative programmes. Additionally, we support representative umpires through ensuring we have umpire coaches at local representative tournaments to identify and coach umpires towards zone squad selection.