Bathurst's Hope Coombes, Ella Muller and Mia Baggett selected for West-Central West representative team

The three Bathurst players were strong contributors towards the city's second place finish at the recent West-Central West Regional League finals, where home side Orange once again had a dominant performance.

Bathurst Netball Association president and regional league coach Tina Muller said it's fantastic for the city to gain three selections in a strong WCW outfit.

"The three girls are very talented and they play some great netball," she said.

"The selections were made in the first round of regional league, before we got hit with a bit of illness and injury, so it was good for the girls to be able to get in there and play some good netball.

"The three of them have all come through the WRAS program and have put in a lot of extra work.

"It's going to be a very strong team with a lot of great players in there. It'll be exciting to see them contest the state cup."

Coombes and Baggett make their return to the representative squad after being a part of the 2021 team, where they were two of the youngest members of the West-Central West crew.

With a year of experience to their name they'll look to make a strong impact while Muller will be out to make her mark in her promotion to the team.

This will be the third season where a West-Central West side has been selected to travel for the Regional State Cup, although COVID has cancelled the previous two editions.

Regional performance and pathways manager for Netball NSW Mardi Aplin said it will be great to finally be able to see how all the regions stack up against one another in the statewide arena.

"We've had our West-Central West regional league competition for a long time and normally we'd send the winning team from that competition to represent the region, but you'd find there were great athletes from other teams who weren't getting the opportunities to compete," she said.

"That's when we created the idea of the Regional State Cup. With that it means everyone has the opportunity to represent their region in a representative team, and that will take place in the October long weekend. It will be our first year of it, even though it should be our third year, but we're very excited to get it up and running.

"Obviously a lot of players in the regions want to take that next step in the pathway, and this competition is for people between the ages of 16 to 22 so it follows on our pathway from our regional academies and is the next step that keeps our athletes at home with their families and at school for as long as we can.

"So far we've had West-Central West, Hunter, South Coast and Riverina who have selected their teams and it's a really nice mix of associations in each of those regions. When everyone comes together it will make for a really great competition later in the year.

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