As if spending the entire season on the road wasn’t stressful enough, now every player is about to be out of contract.
Players have been guaranteed their crucial new pay deal has not been put on the backburner despite the huge amount of work involved in keeping the Super Netball competition alive in its season on the run.
Contracts for every player expire in September with the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) coming to an end. With half the teams in the league now finished their season, players are in limbo until a new agreement is finalised.
The Queensland Firebirds, Melbourne Vixens, Collingwood Magpies and Adelaide Thunderbirds all missed the finals, which start this Saturday, and those clubs have no way to recontract their players.
Super Netball’s teams participation agreement (TPA) is also not locked in for the eight existing clubs although a TV deal for next season, with Fox Sports, has been completed.
Netball Australia boss Kelly Ryan has been in the top job for less than a month but has hardly had a chance to catch her breath as Super Netball raced around the country to beat Covid lockdowns in four states and keep the competition running.
But she said the crisis management had not come at the expense of work on the CBA.
“I do appreciate that it’s hard trying to get the clean space to be able to get it organised but I’m really mindful of the importance of it,” Ryan said of working on the CBA.
“So we have continued to keep the conversations alive and we continue to have really good conversations with the teams about it, and we‘ll keep having those and have as many as we need to have to find a resolution.
“It certainly has not stopped because of the SSN (Suncorp Super Netball). The rest of the business keeps running and that has continued to be (the case).”
Former Diamonds captain Liz Ellis said locking in a new deal was crucial, but it had to be right for the players.
“The thing is now there’s a couple of different leagues around the world, and if we don’t get this right for the players, the players will just pack up and go,” Ellis said.
“There‘s a number of English players out here and a strong league in New Zealand, so we need to make sure that we look after the players, especially after so much has happened with them and we’ve had such a huge ask of them this year.”
Players were asked to take pay cuts last year when Covid first threatened to derail the competition, and with the league losing millions over the past two years setting up hubs and relocating players and staff to ensure the league continued during the pandemic, pay rises may be unrealistic in the new deal.
“The players are pretty pragmatic … they understand the situation that the sport is facing and they want to be part of the solution,” Ellis said.
“But they also need to ensure that they don‘t shoulder all of the load.
“The fact that this has dragged on now for a while is starting to become problematic, it‘s got to be solved soon.”
When the competition moved to Queensland to complete the season, Ryan returned to Victoria to continue to have CBA discussions with the Australian Netball Players Association and deliver on other issues.
“The players get paid until the end of September, but the sooner we can resolve the agreement, the quicker teams can get in and start working through their list management solutions,” she said.
Originally published as Every Super Netball player will soon be out of contract with pay deal expiring this month