Coaches of the teams to participate in today’s Digicel Punjas International Youth Netball Series are confident of a good outing.

The three-day tournament starts today, at the Vodafone Arena in Suva.

Speaking to SUNsports yesterday, Samoan Under-21 coach, Lee Edwards said this is a great opportunity for her players to face New Zealand, Australia and Fiji.

“This is to show where the girls need to be it before heading to Botswana and one of our goals is to get into the top 10 and it’s not going to be an easy one and this series is going to help us,” she said.

“The girls are really excited and they know a lot of these players through Facebook and on television and is a good way to get the girls to face them on court and see how they measure up and how they can stick to their goal.

“We have 17-member squad and twelve are here and we will name the final squad to Botswana later on in the year,” Edwards said.

New Zealand U21 coach Kiri Wills said this is a really important tournament for the four teams as they need to have more competition against international counterparts.

“We really appreciate the opportunity that Netball Fiji has provided us to be here and see each other.

“I think Australia and New Zealand will struggle to get their players together between now and the youth cub with the premiership and the series in Australia are taking a bulk of our players away from us so this is really an important trip for us in terms of tactics and get it together as a team.

“We will look at the 12 that we travelled with but we have some of our players Maya Wilson and Kelly Jury who have been chosen to travel with the Silver Ferns to the Northern Hemisphere shortly in a couple of weeks.

“We felt that its best for them to focus on that so the window is still open and we’ve got a wider squad as well that will be looking to name on the 30th of May but that’s a long way to go before July.

“We will be looking at their forms, injury, compliances and making sure that the girls are still working hard.” Wills said.

Fijian U21 coach, Vicki Wilson said the girls had a wonderful week of intensive training.

“The girls have worked extremely hard, I’ve got 15 girls here to compete and now it’s going to be very tough because New Zealand and Australia are on the top of the world when it come to this age group they are very good, extremely competitive and matured and it’s going to be hard for us I have no fear in the girls taking a big step

“We talked about the word chaos, the game being messy and chaotic and so we did a lot of work trying to get out of a mess and reset and find our own structure and be able to play on,” Wilson added.

Edited by Leone Cabenatabua

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