Ask Anita Hill how many hours she spends each week as a netball volunteer and she hesitates. Because if she tells, Hill jokes, her husband Adrian might find out.
The couple runs a tax accountancy business. Well, during netball season, it seems Adrian does, mostly. But, as for those other numbers, who’s counting, anyway? “It’s a lot,’’ admits Hill. “A lot of time.’’
Despite it, Hill’s sporting balance sheet shows that netball umpiring is experiencing a worrying deficit in the Mornington Peninsula region. And, by all accounts, it’s not just there, but across the state, and surely beyond. Which makes the work of the Peninsula Netball Umpires Association even more crucial.
Hill - with Judi Sutton and Bridget Stonier-Gibson - was one of three PNUA co-founders in 2017, and runs it now with daughter Jade, 18, and Alessandra Tomaselli, who was one of the original umpires. Celebrated by Netball Victoria during National Volunteer Week, the 52-year-old is both encouraged by the association’s achievements and aware of how much more needs to be done.
The concept, at Sutton's instigation, was to try to address the shortage of umpires in the Mornington Peninsula Football Netball League, by forming a centralised body to source and educate independent whistle-blowers for the various clubs in need.
“They struggle to supply A and B grade umpires, so that’s where we started, and just along the way we have been assisting wherever we can with just helping get umpires badged or assisted or mentored,’’ says Hill.
“But we’ve been really restricted, because we only charge the clubs $100 each, so we have no money - no money whatsoever! - but this year we have been really lucky and we’ve been working closely with Netball Victoria.
“The league got a grant for $5000 and they’ve dedicated that to mentoring and developing umpires. So we still do all of this for nothing, obviously, but we‘ve got the money to pay the mentors, which we’ve never had in the past.’’
Every little bit helps to strengthen “Team White”, as Hill calls the peninsula’s umpiring family. And it’s not just the MPFNL that Hill and friends assist. Take the Nepean Netball Association in Tootgarook, for example, which lost the Rosebud venue for its Tuesday night competition to a fire. Next was COVID-19. Followed by what was a potentially fatal third blow.
“They had no umpires, so effectively they were looking at winding up,’’ says Hill. “So they reached out to us, and we had done a bit of work with them in the past, helping them get their umpires badged and then mentoring them.’’
Six young umpires are being assessed for their badges over the next three weeks, in what Shelley Haynes, who has been heavily involved in netball in the area for more than three decades, describes as an exciting response to NNA’s “call for help”. For the ripple effect can be far-reaching.
“I look beyond (the competition potentially not running) and go ‘hang on, what about the girls who are representing Nepean at tournaments? What about that talent Identification for these kids? What about the pathway for these young girls if they’re not playing netball in their own backyard and they’ve got to go all the way up to Frankston or Mornington to play?','' says Haynes.
"So it was bigger than just the umpires. I was looking at athlete development, coach development ... we could have lost all of that.’’
Not on Hill’s watch. “You go down there and it’s a beautiful family environment with all the grandparents, and you just get there and go ‘there’s no way this can fold’. But they’re not going to now - we’ve got them nice and strong, which is lovely.’’
Hill senses there is not just a growing appreciation of the fact that, without umpires, there is no game, but is helping to drive the effort to educate players about how difficult the job can be, and remind them of the fine balance between contact and contest, for example.
So, given how much Hill gives, it seems only right to ask what she gets in return. After a moment’s thought, she says the enforced pandemic break made her realise how much she missed the involvement, the friendships, the people. But it’s the desire to oversee umpiring development and strengthen the sport that drives her most.
Little moments bring unexpected rewards, too. On a recent Zoom familiarisation call for club and MPUA mentors, she recalls, “they all commented on how I’d impacted their lives on their netball journeys, and I went oh, oh, that’s what this was about but that’s really lovely'.’’
And well-deserved. “Anita wants to progress things to help the development of umpires on the Peninsula, and I think that’s a great thing,’’ says Haynes. “The demand for umpires is outdoing the supply. And it’s a huge problem. So looking at ways to try and overcome that is a positive for down this way. And it’s across Victoria, it’s not just down here.
“What the PNUA has done is take away the worry, I guess, of clubs having to field umpires week in, week out, and they’ve got 15 clubs on board, so the numbers tell the story. The majority of the clubs have said ‘yes, that’s the service that we need’… So Anita has taken that worry off them. I just worry about her, taking that burden on.’’
But Hill is undaunted, and apparently indefatigable, while daring to dream of her Peninsula umpiring utopia.
"I would love to see that we're all working as one in the region, so that the footy-netball clubs and the associations are working together for the same goal,'' she says.
"We would have umpires learning, growing and developing in the different environments, they're getting identified, and then those that want to are going off into town. So it’s offering that whole pathway from the beginning to the elite but all on the one page.
"It’s all doing this together. That’s my goal. That’s my dream.’’
-Written by Linda Pearce
