Corby netball league relaunched after more than 50 successful years
A much-loved netball league is being revived and moving to a new timeslot to give more women the chance to play.
Corby Netball League has been going for more than five decades and thousands of women of all ages are thought to have been involved over the years.
But after struggling to get the numbers needed to play on Sundays, the league has decided to switch to Monday evenings across two venues to give more women the chance play.
Local underlay manufacturer Ball & Young has provided sponsorship for equipment for the second venue and the whistle went to mark the start of the very first games last Monday.
League chair Kelly Mitchell said: “We’d always played on Sundays until this season when we really started to struggle to get full teams. We had to cancel all the games one week.
"I think people’s lives changed a bit in Covid and they got their Sundays back and spent more time with their families.
"So we decided to move to Mondays. We’ve already gone up from five or six teams to ten teams.
"We’ve got some back to netball teams and some are returning teams.”
The league will now play at Weldon Village Academy and Corby Business Academy on Monday evenings.
The ten new teams are Sapphires, Corby Netball Club 1, Corby Netball Club 2, GOC, Gretton Panthers, Vixens, Callum's Cougars, Kiss my Pass, Spice Goals and Rockets.
A second kit bag including match balls was funded by a donation of £150 from Ball & Young. Managing director Rachel Attwood said: “It’s a pleasure to be able to support a local initiative that encourages women to take part in sport.
"Having played now for 30 years I have friends all over the country and the league in Corby is played indoors! With so much focus now on mental health it is important to us as a company to work with great activities which will have such a positive impact on the mental health and physical wellbeing of a lot of local women.”
Kelly added: “We’ve got about 100 women involved now including a committee of 13 who are all volunteers.
"There’s been so much work put in and I’d really like to say thanks to all of them as well as Debbie Edwards and Kelly Thomson from England Netball who have got us here.”
You can find out more about the league here.