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Interview with Marg
Angove It takes Adelaide Thunderbirds coach Marg Angove less time than a Kathryn Harby-Williams bullet pass to describe what drives her to have coached netball for the better part of three decades. ‘If I didn’t have a passion for the game, I’d give it away … but I love it,’ she says simply. Harby-Williams, Australian team captain and long-time Adelaide goal defender is just one of scores of players who Angove has guided through age-representation to the senior ranks in her thirty-plus years as an Adelaide-based coach. Angove’s love affair with the sport began in her own playing days with a Uniting Church representative team and in an Adelaide night competition, playing several times a week. By day, she and her husband David ran a newsagency business that required David to start delivering papers at 1 or 2am. These early morning starts meant that David was always home in the evenings to watch their three children, leaving Angove free to play in her night competitions. ‘I was lucky I had that I had a built-in babysitter and that latitude at night,’ she says. ‘I was able to get out, make friends and get involved and eventually I branched into coaching. It seemed like a natural progression.’ That natural progression just kept on, well ... progressing, but her career highlights leave you wondering how much further the branching can go. In 1981, 1982 and 1983 Angove coached South Australia to the title of Australian champions. In 1981 Angove also started coaching Adelaide A Grade Club Contax and in her 15 years at the helm, led them to State League Titles in 1986, 1988, 1990 and 1991. Although this left her little time to spare, she accepted a job as a level three full-time coach at the South Australian Sports Institute (SASI) in 1989 and went on to coach the SASI under-23 development squad and the SASI ‘Sparrows’ under-15 development squad. Through all of this she was coach and mentor to her daughters Jane and Sarah who went on to be state age representatives. In 1995 she was awarded an OAM for services to netball and that may have seemed a nice note on which to wind down. But Angove wanted to enter her third decade of coaching the game with a challenge and so in addition to her SASI role, she became coach of the Adelaide Thunderbirds who joined the newly formed National Netball League in 1997. Her daughter, Jane, later joined her as specialist goaling coach. Angove has led the Thunderbirds to the minor premiership in every year since the national competition’s inception, with national titles in 1998 and 1999. In 2000 she was named the women’s team coach of the year. If making her mark on the domestic scene wasn’t enough, Angove branched out internationally. In 1998 she travelled to Africa where she was a guest coach in Zimbabwe and Namibia, advising coaches and administrators on developing a structure for netball in those countries. Angove says a hunger for learning is what drives her to take on more coaching challenges and she never tires of teaching others and looking for new ways to improve her own approach to the sport. ‘I love tennis and I wish I could play tennis like I coach netball, so last year I took a few lessons,’ she recalls. ‘There were things I learned that I was definitely able to apply to netball, like trying not say too many things at once, like ‘keep your elbow up, bend your knees, take your follow through high, keep your body centred’. I think as coaches in our desire and endeavour to help people, we see three or four things wrong at the same time and we try to correct them all at once, instead of focusing on the easiest things first.’ This hunger for learning is something she goes to great lengths to instil in her players. ‘I have to make sure the training is interesting and varied. Pre-season has to be done and it’s always hard yakka, so we change venues, we do runs around the River Torrens and the Adelaide Zoo, we go to a place we call the snake pit at Largs Bay where there are sandhills and we run and have competitions in the dunes. Next week we’re going to do rock climbing for strength.’ She says she also looks to coaches of other sports for ideas. ‘At SASI I sat opposite [junior women’s squash coach] Di Davis and we exchanged a lot of ideas. I incorporated some of her methods into my training and she did the same. Similarly, I learned a lot from Jan Stirling who coaches basketball about things like screens and rolls. I think an injection of things from outside your sport improves skills and keeps things fresh.’ Angove says she encourages feedback from her players, but admits that sometimes the responses rattle her. ‘I have a big ego, I think all top coaches have, so when a player tells me they’re bored by a particular training session or that it’s too long or two short, I’ll think, ‘well blow you’ and I’ll go out and redouble my efforts to make things interesting. But no matter what, I will always ask for that feedback.’ She says she only has to look as far as her players for inspiration if she’s ever feeling jaded. ‘They work so hard, they have other commitments like families and jobs and they don’t get paid like AFL footballers. So I have to give my very, very best to them and to make it an enjoyable environment that they want to keep coming back to. I can’t do that on my own, I have a great administrative staff who help me concentrate on coaching.’ But the woman the players have dubbed ‘Sarge’ says she does have a use-by-date as coach. ‘This is my last year of this appointment with the Thunderbirds. I might go another year after the Commonwealth Games but who knows what will happen. There could be some big losses like [Thunderbirds] Harby and Delaney and Sutter, but then there’s the challenge of blooding some youngsters and we do have some good ones coming through. But I could wake up half-way through a season like [AFL coach] Malcolm Blight and decide, ‘nope, that’s it’. ‘I can leave it behind. There are things I want to do, like spend some time with the grandchildren, or maybe I’ll take up golf, but I’m too impatient for that. I’ll definitely be playing tennis. I’ll probably be out there at least three or four times a week.’ (article appears in Sports Coach, Vol 23 No. 4, 2001) |
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