Netball
Royal Russell has a reputable and well established netball programme. Our mission at Royal Russell is to aid girls to become the ‘best athlete they can be’. Being dedicated and motivated towards our netball programme will help towards achieving this goal.
Our aim is not only to coach the core skills, depending on the age and experience of all our players, but to excel the elite by focusing on a high level of technical and tactical play.
Our carefully designed Long Term Athlete development model sees players typically receive around fifteen hours of coaching per week from highly qualified and experienced coaches. Resources include the use of handbooks, video analysis of matches and evaluation of performance related statistics. Alongside team specific court sessions, we also run positional masterclasses, one to one workshops and classroom based sessions for external feedback and tactical understanding. Personal fitness programmes are delivered according to players needs identified by our thorough fitness testing procedure using our state of the art sports science and swimming pool facilities.
We have a strong links with local netball clubs, Superleague teams including Surrey Storm and London Pulse and the national programme pathway.
We have an exceptional standard of facilities including 3 floodlit netball courts and 3 training netball courts. We also have use of an indoor court in our large Sports Hall with an inside training-warm up area.
We expect all our players to leave Royal Russell having reached the very limit of their potential and to pursue lifelong participation in netball and sport.
Netball is the leading girls sport in the UK. It’s progression in the past few years has seen the development of a full time national programme finally giving the sport a ‘professional’ status.
Internationally, England ranks 3rd in the world behind Australia and New Zealand who have a full time national and club programs. With our national players now also having this full-time status we fully expect this performance gap to close and be competing for places one and two on the world stage.
Having the aspiration to become an England netballer now offers the title of professional athlete which is something it has never been able to offer previously. Netball as a sport will continue to go from strength to strength and as a result of this growing profile top independent schools such as Royal Russell have started to invest heavily into their netball programs.
At Russell we offer an inclusive netball programme that caters for all abilities. It’s unique to any other school as it allows girls from Year 7-13 to choose netball as a games option in both autumn and spring terms.
Our delivery is not just court based, we offer a holistic program spanning from on court technical session to classroom based video analysis. This combined with a platform called Hudl allows us to breakdown the match, annotate and send the girls both unit/ team and individual feedback. Very few schools are able to offer this kind of support.
Additional to this, we have exceptional playing facilities including three floodlit netball courts and three additional training courts on our MUGA. We also have an indoor court where all our cup and A team matches are played.
A combination of all these factors allows us to confidently say that Royal Russell has one of the best netball programs on offer within the independent schools sector.
Please feel free to come and visit the school and meet our Head of Netball, Alice Johnson.