It was just another ordinary day in December until Mikaela Minns received a phone call from her coach offering her the chance to play netball overseas - a chance to play professional netball with the Selangor Angels in Malaysia.
Marg Lind, City West Falcons championship head coach, presented Minns with the proposition and everything from there just fell into place.
“I had just re-signed to Falcons and Marg says to me, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you’d be interested, but a team in Malaysia is looking for an international import’. Say no more, I’m in!” she explains.
Thus, Minns had signed with the Selangor Angels in the Netball Super League and embarked on the trip of a lifetime. She flew over to Malaysia for pre-season training in January ready for the season in February.
“I had no idea what I was going to expect over there,” Minns says.
“My dad came over for the first 11 days to see how everything was going because he’d never been to Malaysia before. He loves going with all his kids to their random sporting things.”
Pre-season took all of January to build upon combinations, get to know one another and prepare for the season ahead.
When you think of pre-season, you might think of getting to training, court work for two hours, in the gym alongside some conditioning sessions. All this starting sometime between 9am and 5pm.
Not for Minns, who went through training into the dead hours of the night, eating dinner at 3am and sleeping in the middle of the day – all in a day’s work in Malaysia.
“We would finish training at 11pm or 12am, and then we’d go have dinner and we’d get up and have training at 9am followed by a midday nap,” Minns says.
It took some time to get adjusted to a different lifestyle, but Minns wouldn’t change it for the world.
One challenge she did have was going to a country where English isn’t the primary language. The language barrier was imminent from the start.
All the players, coaches and support staff could speak English in a group setting, but most of the time they would then switch to their native language when talking with each other.
“I learned some words, but I didn’t have any knowledge of the language going in,” Minns says. “It probably would’ve been smart to so dome preparation.”
“Thankfully, they all knew English well. They’d say, ‘Sorry my English isn’t very good’ and then they’d be completely fluent.”
“Sometimes in the group chats, the coaches would be speaking Malayan, so the other international girl and I would have no idea what was going on.”
With a minor language barrier, Minns learnt to read bodies more as there were a few instances where she had no clue what anyone was saying and had to fill in the gaps.
“Being clear in communication is also very important because sometimes when they would speak, they might accidentally say something in Malayan,” Minns says.
“I had to learn the key words they would use and then I would have to be very clear when I was speaking because if I slur my words, it was difficult for the others to understand.”
At least the most familiar thing for Minns was the game of netball. The style the Angels played was very similar to the Australian style, but with a little twist.
There was a lot of one-on-one and zone defence, but the setup would be different. The defenders would set up a play to not directly cover players in the third, but setup for a secondary intercept. Minns described it as “a trick to get the opposition to throw the ball over the first person to then get a gain.”
Other than that, it was an environment that Minns could easily adapt to as it wasn’t very different to the Australian game.
But the biggest takeaway from the trip was the importance of family and always being connected and involved in other people’s lives.
“The strange thing was, when I left, I got homesick because it was like being in a second family,” Minns says. “Half the team would sleep in our apartment; they would get all their doonas out in the loungeroom and would be staying there.”
At just 20 years old, Minns has travelled the world playing the game she loves. While it may have been a short stint, Minns learned a lot about herself as a player and as a person, with skills she has brought back into her Falcons environment.
