Debbie White on her time with the LG Mystics

Tuesday, 10 February 2009

The notorious rugby sevens coach Gordon Tietjens tried to break her, but the biggest hurdle for Balclutha-born Debbie White is the humidity of Auckland.
 
White is flatting in Auckland with another South Islander – ex netballer and now beach volleyballer, Anna Scarlett, but she’s finding the change in temperature a struggle. “Oh my god, I was dying in the Auckland heat when I first moved up from Dunedin,” White says of the big city’s notorious summer humidity - an entirely different climate from the lower South Island. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Central Otago where it gets very hot in summer, but this was a whole other experience. For the first week here, I hardly slept. The girls must have got so sick of me saying, ‘Oh, it’s so hot!’ - I felt like I was in Jamaica again!”
 
There was heat of a different kind during preseason training which featured one of Gordon Tietjens infamous, gut-stripping boot camps, more familiar to his rugby charges than semi-professional netballers. After a glycogen-draining day full of sweat expenditure and dreaded beep tests (in which you pretty much run until you drop), instead of gratefully tucking up in bed exhausted at 10pm, they were herded off on a five-hour night walk that culminated in climbing Mount Maunganui’s 231-metre summit by torchlight.
 “Oh God, I just about died!” White says with a big, self-effacing giggle. As a 30-year-old midcourter who represented the Silver Ferns (in between a career as a P.E. teacher and Fruit In Schools promoter), White knew what Tietjens and LG Mystics coach TeAroha Keenan were really looking for in the grueling fitness camp: not so much a test of the women’s physical acumen as their mental toughness.
 
“I think the difference between being a good netball player and a really good netball player is mental,” says White. “If you’re not mentally hard, you just don’t cut it. That’s not just dealing with, say, a few losses in a row, or knowing not to rest on your laurels if you’re winning. The season is simply long and tiring and you have to be careful that you’re still excited about going to practice and that you’re still switched on for every game. I think that’s the biggest challenge, especially with all the travelling back and forth across the Tasman.”
 
As for the competition itself, White is a big supporting of bringing the best of two nations together.
 “I really liked the idea from the start,” White says. “There used to be a big step up in New Zealand from provincial netball to the National Bank Cup (New Zealand’s previous domestic franchise competition), but the ANZ Championship has proved another whole step up from that again. That’s brilliant because the girls who aren’t in national representative squads get to see what the competition is like near the top international level and I think it will be easier for people to go from this new championship to playing for the Silver Ferns in a test match. It’s just that much faster and harder.”
 
And who does White see as the big Kiwi competition in 2009 “The Steel have a good line-up this year again, the Magic have managed to get an even stronger team than last year and Canterbury have got Ang Mitchell back and she definitely adds depth to that team. I’d like to rate the LG Mystics’ chances, too: we’ve got a youngish side, a new mix of people, a number of players who are quite unknown, but right on the verge of making their name. People probably see us as underdogs, but I think we could be quite competitive,” says White.
 
So in the 2009 season watch out for White, she could well be hot on the court and off it too.