WITH senior sport getting the all clear on Wednesday morning, Bathurst Netball Association (BNA) has locked in a starting date for both its senior and junior competitions for the 2020 season.
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While both senior and junior sport can commence from July 1, BNA have decided on the weekend of July 25-26 as its start date.
BNA president Tina Muller said she had been hoping to start several weeks earlier, but there were clashes with both school holidays and school-based clubs.
"We'd love to start a little bit earlier but because we have schools involved and because we have school holidays, we have to wait for them to come back," she said.
Muller said it was exciting that netball could finally make its return next month.
"We have some very happy members now," she said.
"It was a bit disappointing to hear the juniors were only getting the go ahead.
"At least now we can be prepared now for our season. It will be good if we had a little more on requirements, but we definitely can start our preparation now."
Currently, no teams have returned to training according to Muller.
"We actually haven't got any of our teams back training as of yet," she said.
"We're hoping to get our representatives teams up and going next week. We sent some info out to our rep teams in the past few days.
"It was a bit difficult; we got the all clear that we could go back and train but you have to be registered to train.
"With not knowing if seniors were coming back, we didn't want people to register not having the full go ahead.
"We're going through what restrictions are out there so we can provide the right information to the clubs, but it's changing daily almost."
The BNA committee has also discussed some changes on matchday, to help congestion down at the John Matthews Sporting Complex.
"We're still waiting to see if there'll be any more restrictions," Muller said.
"We've already had a look at reducing our game time slightly and starting earlier in the day so we can have a bigger break between our games and get people out and people back in with less congestion."
Muller had in early June agreed with comments made by several Australian netball figures who expressed their dissatisfaction with the NSW Government's handling of the community sport.
In an open letter to state premier Gladys Berejiklian a selection of NSW coaches and players said they had been left feeling "high and dry" due to a lack of communication.
The letter was signed by Maddy Proud (NSW Swifts captain), Briony Akle (Swifts coach), Jo Harten (Giants Netball captain), Caitlin Bassett (Australian Diamonds captain) and Julie Fitzgerald (Giants coach).