Saturday 20th April will see Zurich host The Peppermill Challenge, a national women’s netball tournament. 13 teams from across the country will compete for the Peppermill Trophy on a day that promises to be filled with exciting games and quick moves from some of the country’s best players.

Organised by Netball Switzerland, this is the first time Zurich has hosted this event and the club is excited to welcome teams from as far afield as Nyon, Geneva and Lausanne, as well as closer to home from Basel and Zug.

Zurich Netball Club has entered three teams, and all have been training hard over the last months with an eye on the prize.

If you would like to come and discover netball or cheer on Zurich, we’d be delighted to see you!

The tournament takes place at International Community School of Zurich
Strubenacher 3, 8126 Zumikon, Switzerland from 9.30am onwards.

More info from info@netballswitzerland.ch

Finally a ten minute break!

Zurich Netball Club is so immensely proud of our girls!  A few months ago we were all given the opportunity to sign up for two weekends of training and trials to be a part of the Swiss Open Netball Team, planning to play in the European Open Championships in Scotland later this year. Not only did we have players attend with the hopes of being selected, we also had a few eager beavers brave the early train simply in order to learn from the highly experienced coaches and to have another weekend of their favourite sport.

An enormous congratulations to the following ladies who are now going to Aberdeen in May, proudly displaying the red and white! Claudia Almer, Mollie Brodie, Konio Cotti, Ann Northfield, Lorna Rettig, Johanna Sargeant and Gillian Towns (reserve)

One day we dream of all courts in Switzerland having netball lines!

Both weekends began with fitness work (‘beep test’ is now a dirty word) and specific netball drills that focused on ball skills, timing, reading your fellow players, movement and bodily awareness. And the, of course, a lot of netball! It was great to meet and make friends with members from other clubs around Switzerland, as well as to have a weekend away with some of our members.

All of those who attended are eager to bring their newfound skills and knowledge back to Zurich Netball Club for future trainings – we will all be super-fit elite netballers in no time!

A few of our girls enjoying a well deserved beer on the way home.

Last Wednesday was Zurich Netball Club’s AGM, where we all marvelled at our club’s achievements over the past year. We announced the winners of our Lion’s League, gave out a couple of awards, and welcomed in our new committee for 2013. For the first time, we also discussed our club’s future as a mixed club and took a closed vote on whether to remain that way. We followed up our AGM with a fun versatility game, which saw players both struggle and revel in positions they usually avoid, and even got a few unsuspecting members to give umpiring a go!

Our (many) Achievements!

– We began Switzerland’s first netball league, which is now so successful that we have enough for four teams!

– Three of our members (Lorna, Mollie and Jo C) were selected for the Swiss Open team and played in Gibraltar, earning Switzerland an official Netball World Ranking of 31.

– We entered a team in Zurich’s SOLA run in May.

– We ran our first international tournament, which we managed to win!

– We also managed to take home the trophy for the Peppermill Tournament in Lausanne, finally bringing the silverware over to our side of the country.

Awards

– The Fondue Fighters took out the trophy (okay, the socks) for winning our most recent Lion’s League. Congratulations to them all! It was a very tight competition this time.

– Claudia won the Players’ Player of our Lion’s League — the player who not only has fantastic skills as a netballer, but also displays great sportsmanship and is an all-round asset to our club.

– Christine won the most committed award (those of you who know her shouldn’t be too surprised by this!).

– Linda and Anna both won awards for being the most improved. Well done ladies!

Mixed or Ladies only?

After much interesting discussion we all took a closed vote, with the majority of people choosing to keep Zurich Netball Club a mixed club. So let’s spread the word to the sporty men we know and see if we can take a lead on the development of mixed netball in Switzerland!

Our New Committee 

We sadly say goodbye and an enormous thank you to three members of our committee who are stepping down, each of whom has been there from the start. Thanks to Jenny Evans, our president, Jen Hartley, our finance officer, and Gillian Towns, our club development officer. You ladies will be sadly missed and we all know what an amazing job you have done to bring our club to the level that it currently is. Thank you! And with that, we offer a big welcome to our new committee for 2013: Jo Cackett, Anna Currie, Jo O’Hora, Johanna Sargeant, Claudia Almer, Christine Gutgesell and Rosie Walkinton. We wish you all much fun and enthusiasm for the upcoming year!

Happy New Year! And a very happy return to netball for all our Lion’s League teams last night – all four teams played, and it seemed that everyone was very happy to get back into it after a Christmas break.

Speaking of our Lion’s League, you’ll notice that all the results for the league are now posted here on this site. After last night’s matches, we have the Fondue Fighters and the Raclette Rangers battling it out for first place… keep up the good competition, ladies!

This upcoming weekend is a big one for quite a few of our players, as the trials for the Swiss Open Team are taking place in Geneva. We wish the very best of luck to all the girls travelling there, and look forward to hearing all about it.

2012 Open Swiss Team, with three members of our club – Jo C, Lorna and Mollie. Maybe we’ll have even more in the 2013 team!

All of us here at Zurich Netball Club hope that all our members and their families have had wonderful Christmases and are gearing up for a fabulous New Year. Our Christmas social of karaoke and tapas at Toro Bar was certainly a night to remember, with surprise talents cropping up all over the place, and of course bucket-loads of laughter.Those of you with an in-built karaoke phobia missed out! 

If you’re missing your weekly dose of the world’s greatest sport, don’t fret – you only have ten days until you can throw a ball around again (or just stalk one of our members who claims to always have a ball and post in her car ‘just in case a game were to break out’). We return on January 9th with a match night, with all league teams playing. Looking forward to seeing you all there! 

We have added an exciting new section to our blog (see? It’s right there!) called ‘Player Profiles’. We all thought it was important to show the enormous diversity of our club – from the backgrounds of each of our players, to the amount of time they’ve been playing, to what surprising things they like to do in their spare time (apart from netball). We are a club of such scope, and of this we can all be proud!

We will be highlighting a new player each week, starting with those who are playing in the current Lion’s League. So keep your eyes peeled for updates!

Last night saw the relaunch of our Lion’s League. We now have enough members for four teams, with nine players on each team, which is really the ideal situation for a fun and successful league!

For information about the matches, please check the Zurich Netball League Website.

Dark clouds did not deter us, rains did not halt our step! The Zurich International Netball Tournament went on, and was a raging success!

The official competitive tournament took place on the Saturday, with five teams battling it out from 10am until 5pm. A high standard of netball and great sportsmanship shown by each and every player from all teams. It was a little unfortunate that Zurich’s reputation as the most expensive city in the world meant that a couple of teams had to pull out as the tournament got closer, but, in the end, there was a full day of netball played by everyone, which is really all that we were looking for. What a treat it was to be able to play so much of that sport we love! And the icing on the cake? A very close grand final between Zurich’s A team and Copenhagen, with Zurich winning the title and keeping that enormous engraved cow bell trophy at home.

The sun greeted us all again on the Sunday, allowing all those willing to stretch those sore and tired muscles to play a day of versatility netball. Official teams were scrapped, and we found ourselves playing with our opponents from the day before. The teams were fairly evenly matched, with the points level at the end of the first round-robin. However, the Philadelphians finally got the better of both the Exploding Penguins and the Pink Ladies, and were rewarded for their general all-round awesomeness with Toblerones. We finished the weekend with a pot-luck picnic lunch put on by the International School.

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A big thank you to our amazing club president, Jenny Evans, who organised such a fulfilling weekend, to all those from the club that contributed in so many ways, and to all the players for bringing their all.