Netball New Zealand has confirmed that Ana Noovao, the 15th player to captain the Silver Ferns, has died aged 58. In a statement released on Tuesday morning, the organisation said she died peacefully on Sunday 9 August in Rockhampton, Queensland, after a long illness, surrounded by her family and loved ones.
Netball New Zealand president Dr Tina Karaitiana said Noovao “carried the captaincy of the Silver Ferns with real grace, and she gave the game back far more than it ever asked of her, as a player, as a coach, and as a leader for Cook Islands netball”.
Noovao was a midcourter who played centre, wing attack and wing defence, and she arrived in the national side with a reputation for making the game look easier than it was. Her Silver Ferns player profile describes her as an exceptionally gifted young player with natural creativity, deft movement and a feeding ability that set up the shooters around her. Netball New Zealand made the same point in different words this week, remembering a strong and mobile attacker with a calm temperament.
She came up through the age grades in Auckland while playing club netball for College Rifles. She toured Canada with the New Zealand Young Internationals in 1986 and captained the New Zealand under 21 side at the 1987 World Youth Championships, which marked her out early as someone the selectors saw as a leader rather than only a ball player.
Her senior debut came on 26 April 1989 against Australia, when she was 21 years old. She was the 88th player to be capped by New Zealand. Within a year she had been promoted to vice-captain, a role she held during the 1990 Commonwealth Games demonstration match against Australia, at a time when netball was still fighting for a place on the main programme of major multi-sport events.
The high point of her playing career was also one of the hardest results in New Zealand netball history. Noovao was part of the Silver Ferns side that reached the final of the 1991 World Netball Championships and lost to Australia by a single goal. The team came home with silver and the knowledge that the gap between the two countries at that point could be measured in one shot.
When Waimarama Taumaunu retired in 1992, Noovao was named captain. She finished with 23 test caps across four seasons, a total that says less about her standing than it does about the era. The Silver Ferns of the late 1980s and early 1990s played only a handful of internationals in a normal year, so a player could hold down a starting bib for four seasons and still finish with a caps tally a modern professional would pass inside two. Being handed the captaincy at all placed her in a very short line of names.
What happened next is the part of her story that has been quietly influential. Noovao was proud of her Cook Islands heritage and went on to play two seasons for the Cook Islands national team, then returned to the side as its coach. In 2007 she coached the Cook Islands to seventh place at the World Netball Championships in Auckland, a result achieved by a country of fewer than 20,000 people against opponents drawing on far deeper playing numbers and far bigger budgets. For Pacific netball it was a marker that a small nation could be organised and competitive at the top level rather than simply making up the draw.
Between and around those roles she coached generations of South Auckland schoolgirls, which is the work that rarely appears in a career summary and often matters most. Anyone who has run a school netball programme knows the arithmetic involved, the borrowed vans, the shared uniforms, the Saturday mornings that start before dawn. Netball New Zealand said this week that she kept playing and kept building the game after relocating to Queensland, where she had lived in recent years.
Tributes have come from her old team-mates. RNZ reported that former Silver Fern Leonie Leaver said they would celebrate Noovao’s life and her contribution to netball at their club, College Rifles in Auckland. Leaver was a team-mate in the 1991 World Championships squad and played 19 tests for New Zealand.
Noovao belongs to a generation of Silver Ferns who played before the game was professional, before the national league was televised, and before players could expect to be paid for the seasons they gave up. They trained around jobs and study, paid their own way to tournaments more often than not, and built the audience that the current side now plays in front of. Noovao was only the 15th woman to lead them, and every captain since has inherited something from the ones who went first.
It is worth noting what she did with the standing the game gave her. She took it to the Cook Islands, to South Auckland school courts, and to a regional club in Queensland, none of which came with a profile or a pay cheque. Netball New Zealand’s tribute made the same point about a player whose best known moment on the court was a final her team lost.
Did you play with or against Ana Noovao, or were you coached by her in South Auckland or the Cook Islands? Share your memories in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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