By MARK RAYNER

The Bathurst Goldminers State League Women will have a more stable line-up in 2010, one which they will show off for the first time when they hit the court against the Shoalhaven Tigers on Sunday at the Bathurst Indoor Sports Stadium.

The Goldminers only rejoined the State League competition last year and while they went close to making the finals, a struggle each week for numbers and lack of a full-time coach proved too much to overcome.

However, those problems have been rectified with Janine Cross stepping in to coach the girls and new recruits joining the team.

"I think the team is a lot more stable than last year, we have a more reliable complement of players and there has been a good roll-up at training," Cross said.

"It's quite a different team we only have Katherine Burke, Melissa Smith, Sam Gaal and Tahrynn Hadson still playing from last year and Sarah Murray and Erin Cafe coming up from the Youth League side.

"The girls went close to making the play-offs last year so I think it [our goal] would have to be to go one step further and make the play-offs."

The Goldminers will play 18 matches during the regular season. After Shoalhaven they will face Dubbo, Newcastle, Power and Penrith for their first five games.

Early in the season they will play one game every two weeks, but later they begin playing more regularly.

"It's a strange draw, you have some teams that are playing regularly and there are teams like us who only play every couple of weeks early," Cross said. "It's tough in that you aren't getting that constant game time, but it does give players plenty of time to recover from injuries."

The Bathurst team are also hampered because they haven't played any pre-season trials, but Cross is confident that they will come together as a team pretty quickly.

"They haven't played together as a team yet but some of them play in the weekly competition together and I don't think it will take too long [for them to start playing as a team]," she said.

Shoalhaven are likely to be in a similar position because they didn't compete in the State League last year and Cross described the way the visiting Tigers would play as a "bit of an unknown quantity at this stage".

The Bathurst Goldminers State League women take on the Shoalhaven Tigers at the Bathurst Indoor Sports Stadium at 11am on Sunday.

BATHURST GOLDMINERS: Katherine Burke, Melissa Smith, Elisha Radburn, Abby Carmichael, Tahrynn Hadson, Sarah Murray, Codie Jennings, Sam Gaal, Mary-Anne Porter, Haylee Lepaio.