The Glasgow Wildcats – talented,dedicated and tight-knit – are part of netball's revolution and poster girls for a campaign to inspire a generation of young Scottish women to get into sport
IN A leisure centre tucked away on a quiet Glasgow housing estate, a group of young women dressed in pink and black are standing in a circle. Sleet falls silently past the street lights outside, but in here, the noise level is obnoxiously loud. Hand
bags have spilled their contents and an assortment of makeup, mobiles and juice bottles lies scattered across the floor. Raucous laughter fills the air as nuggets of gossip are shared, and everyone stands back to admire one girl's recently straightened hair. It's only when you notice the large white ball being thrown casually back and forth, punctuating the unashamedly girly conversation, that you realise that these aren't just women: they're Wildcats.
Every woman in this room can lift one and a half times her own body weight. Each of them trains seven days a week and could probably run a half marathon without breaking a sweat. At the weekend, instead of pulling on a mini-dress and hitting the clubs, they pull on a mini-dress and hit the court. They are Scotland's netball elite, members of a new type of sports team never before seen in this country, and they are about to become very famous indeed.
Glasgow Wildcats is Scotland's only Superleague netball team. Formed 18 months ago as part of a significant three-year investment by Glasgow City Council of around £200,000 to promote netball in the run-up to the city's Commonwealth Games in 2014, they are the living, breathing, clad-in-hot-pink-and-black embodiment of a turning point in a sport that has for many years struggled with a primary school gym slip image.
"These girls have been around netball a long time," says Mary Tough, assistant coach of the Glasgow Wildcats coming into the sports hall, her face flushed from a warm-up on the treadmill. "This is the most exciting time they've ever seen in netball in Scotland and they want to be a part of it. They don't want to miss out."
The circle pulls apart and the girls start peeling off hoodies and jogging bottoms to reveal the sort of muscles that wouldn't look out of place in a weight-lifting competition. Tonight's training is a three-hour session, and they're starting off with an hour of strength and conditioning work guided by Tim Silvester, an affable coach from SportScotland's Institute of Sport, who is now standing in the middle of the hall barking orders. As they begin running round the sports hall one of the women makes a remark about a bruise on the other's leg. "Shut it, fat ass!" she replies, and they all burst into peals of laughter.
There are 15 women on the Glasgow Wildcats Superleague netball team. The youngest is 18, the oldest is 31. The tallest is 6ft 1in, the smallest just 5ft 5in. During the five-month Co-operative Superleague Netball season, which runs from December to April, these 15 women will play 16 games against eight other Superleague netball teams, seven of which are English. Netball in England is extraordinarily well funded, and thanks to the creation of the Superleague in 2005, now fields a calibre of player that has seen England ranked third in the world at netball, behind only Australia and New Zealand.
Superleague netball matches are glamorous, high- energy affairs, so much so that they are now broadcast on Sky Sports every weekend. It is undoubtedly sport, but it's also, well, sexy. The players wear short mini dresses cut to show their curves, jogging on court in full make-up, with not a hair out of place. The Wildcats have their own cheerleading squad, complete with silver pom-poms, and fans wave large pink cat paws every time the team score a point. From the stands they shout "Go Wildcats and watch your back!", while screens around the court enquire: "We're ready to pounce... are you?"
Once they start playing, however, what grabs most people's attention about Superleague netball is the speed. At this level netball is fast – often blink-of-an-eye fast. It's a far cry from the dim memories most women hold of throwing a ball around the school gym in a pair of plimsolls.
"You have to be strong," says Silvester, taking a brief break as the girls start warming up. "It's a fast game, it's a very dynamic game, and it's about power and speed. To have good speed you need to be strong. People don't realise the amount of work these girls do. They train so much. It's certainly up there in terms of dedication, commitment and skill level with the professional sports. It's a fast game and a very technical sport."
And therein lies the rub. Netball, despite being a core sport of the Commonwealth games and being admitted as an Olympic sport in 1995, is far from professional in this country. Every woman in this room, in addition to training every day of the week, either works full-time or is in full-time education.
Jenna Storie, 23, a petite brunette with extraordinarily long eyelashes who plays the crucial netball position of wing attack, works as a management accountant in Glasgow. When I ask her how many days she trains she has to stop and think.
"We have sessions on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights for three hours," she starts, counting them off on her fingers. "Then we train on Thursday morning, and Thursday night, and then on Friday morning again. Then we have games and extra training at the weekends."
Doesn't she get fed up? She giggles. "You don't get fed up, just tired. You need a rest but you don't necessarily get it. You just need to battle through it. I get home at night, climb into bed and fall asleep on my boyfriend."
For nearly every woman on the team, the Glasgow Wildcats is not their only netballing commitment. With only one or two exceptions, the Wildcats are also the Scotland team, playing regular international games – including one with world number ones Australia next month - and training for the Netball World Championships in 2011. In the past year they have played in tournaments in Singapore, the Cook Islands and New Zealand. Tough, now 42, captained Scotland's netball team ten years ago and says the creation of the Wildcats – in the summer of 2008 – has led to a significant change in the country's presence on the international scoreboard.
"When I played international netball we played three international games in a year," she reflects. "Now, these guys are playing what would be classed as international netball almost every weekend through Glasgow Wildcats against other Superleague teams. The players in the Superleague are some of the best players in the world. Playing against them every week is a huge benefit." And it's starting to show. In 2008 Scotland was more pussycat than wildcat, ranked 17th in the world. Now the country sits 13th - a significant improvement but one that is not, frustratingly, quite good enough to qualify the team for entry into the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010. Scotland is first reserve, meaning that if a country drops out for any reason, Scotland will be admitted. Whether or not that is likely to happen, the team are training as if they are going to Delhi in August, something else which is significantly adding to their training schedule.
Silvester asks the girls to pick up the pace, putting them into groups of threes. They move round the room working on different muscle groups – running backwards and forwards, jumping on and off small obstacles, and clearing tiny, narrowly spaced hurdles. The chattering that previously dominated the sports hall is replaced by heavy breathing and the occasional click of frustration when a hurdle is missed.
A large part of the team's improvement is down to Denise Holland, the tough no-nonsense coach from Essex who spent more than ten years playing top-level netball in Hong Kong and Australasia and who took on the first ever full-time Scotland netball coach job in 2008, as well as the job of coaching the Glasgow Wildcats. To her annoyance she hasn't been able to make tonight's training, and is stuck in London because of the snow. The next day, however, she talks passionately about the commitment her players are willing to make.
"They're all fighting against having to hold down full-time jobs and education as well as playing," says Holland. "That means the athletes have to make massive sacrifices. When I first came onboard they had absolutely no idea what was demanded of them. The expectation was to nurture their work ethic all the way through last year and I would say now they've made the transition into elite sport, which means that there really is no social life. There is nothing else other than your work and your sport. There's very little time left in the week for anything else."
Hayley Mulheron, who with 36in legs is the tallest girl on the team, says she doesn't mind. Aged 23 with a flawless tan and an enormous smile, she works by day for the Department of Work and Pensions.
"I've been doing this so long I don't know what I'd do without it," she says, feeling the large silver hoop earrings in her ears. "If I've got a day off I spend it with my mum or my boyfriend. None of this going out and getting drunk. I don't do that at all. I'm just not interested in it."
These young women – fit, strong, determined, and extraordinary disciplined, are a refreshing antidote to the endless images of drunken "booze Britain" females constantly being pushed by the media. For those at the heart of netball, there is a real feeling that the game can help inspire young women across Scotland to become more motivated, less lazy even. There are now 25,000 girls in the country playing the game on a weekly basis, a figure that, thanks to the increasingly high-profile presence of the Glasgow Wildcats, is expected to increase.
"More young girls than ever now see their role models in netball, rather than anywhere else," points out Patricia Osbourne, chair of Netball Scotland. "It's lost its tired image, people are realising it's a dynamic game, and because of the exposure we've had recently and being able to play high-level teams in the Superleague, it's fostered a huge amount more interest."
Holland, certainly, has grand ambitions for the game. She wants the Scotland team in the top eight in the world, but she's aware of the wider picture too. "I think the ultimate goal is to leave a legacy after the 2014 Commonwealth games that netball in Scotland is seriously recognised as a massive participation sport. That it can be enjoyed by everyone."
Silvester has finished his session. Before he leaves for the night he makes an interesting remark. "If anything, women are more dedicated to their training outwith the actual sport itself than the male athletes," he says. "The girls tend to be far more focused than the men."
Tough takes over the training session, and Silvester's comment soon makes sense. The girls start throwing and catching the ball, and the power behind their movements is phenomenal. One girl catches the ball awkwardly and it slams into her wrist. "Ouch," she remarks unconcernedly, throwing the ball back to her team mate. Such injuries are clearly part of the deal.
For many of these women, what has kept them coming back to netball is the friendship. "I spend more time with these girls than I do with my own family," says Fiona Moore, 24, who works as a police officer in Glasgow and plays in the centre of the court. "Some of my best friends are here."
There are, I establish, occasional Wildcats nights out, although I am assured by a not-quite-straight-faced 29-year-old Lesley MacDonald, the Wildcats and Scotland team captain and a sports development officer, that they are relatively booze free. Whatever the case, they are clearly a tight-knit bunch.
Hu Paul, a 28-year-old New Zealander from Auckland who moved to Scotland just over a year ago with her rugby coach husband (he coaches the Scotland women's rugby team at Murrayfield) because she wanted to do the "overseas experience", is a case in point. As well as playing centre position for the Glasgow Wildcats she also plays for the Rugby Ecosse Sevens squad. And now, because she has been resident in the country for 12 months, she can play netball for Scotland. She is, she says, delighted.
"It's pretty cool," she says, shaking back her ponytail as she performs some stretches against the wall. "I've actually been quite overwhelmed at how the girls have taken me in because obviously I'm a bit of an outsider, not being from here. But they've been so welcoming. It really is a family. I've been so lucky."
It's all a far cry from Madame Osterberg's college of physical training in Hampstead, where the first game of netball was played in Britain in 1895. Imported from America, where basketball had been created four years earlier by James Naismith, a Canadian who was asked to invent an indoor game to keep the restless young men of a Massachusetts branch of the School for Christian Workers occupied, "women's basketball" arrived in England with no printed rules, no court lines, circles or boundaries. The goals were actual baskets, hung on walls. Over the next few years the ladies of Madame Osterberg's played around with the game, finally printing a set of rules in 1901.
It became an instant hit in schools because of its simplicity, and the fact that it could be played indoors, and PE teachers were quick to introduce it to their pupils.
Netball is, perhaps, the consummate Commonwealth sport. In the early part of the 20th century it spread like wildfire across the British empire, which is probably why today's world rankings include countries such as Jamaica (4), Cook Islands (7) and Trinidad & Tobago (10) in the top ten. There is an intense feeling now among the netballing community in Scotland that if Glasgow is to host the Commonwealth Games in 2014, it cannot afford to let the side down.
Storie, who as well as working full time is juggling her training with a set of accountancy exams, puts the team's motivation into words. "I can't wait for 2014. That's my main goal. That's why I'm here, doing all this training. This is what it's all for."
The training session is beginning to wind down. Sleet is still falling and the sodium coloured lights cast a pale gloom over the streets. The team pull their jogging bottoms back on over their shorts and the girly conversation resumes with a resounding chatter. They slip out into the night – women, Wildcats. r
Glasgow Wildcats' next Superleague game is vs Surrey Storm, broadcast live on Sky Sports, 8 February, 7.30pm. See
www.glasgowwildcats.co.uk.
• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 24 January, 2010