Medics Netball round up season with gold medal

With all the excitement of Varsity out the way, with the BUCS season finished, and with no fixtures left until October, it’s about time that Medics Netball had some of the limelight.

Netball is one of those sports that lots of boys claim not to like, mostly because they don’t understand it. Despite not being able to run with the ball, netball is an extremely skilful, fast paced sport. And the Medics happen to be rather good at it.

This season, the Imperial Medics netball 1st team have played netball three times a week since the beginning of the season, almost without fail. That adds up to in excess of 34 hours of matches. In that time, we’ve scored more than 1400 goals. That’s more than a goal every 90 seconds. And if that doesn’t make for exciting viewing, I don’t know what does!

Of those 34 games, we’ve lost only four. (One of these was started with only five players (traffic on the way there) and we only lost by one goal.) If I may say so myself, that’s pretty impressive!

Last term, the team went to Sheffield for the BUCS South-East Conference cup final. 128 teams enter this competition, so even to get this far was an achievement. Our rivals in the final were Brighton 1s, whom we had both lost to and beaten during the season. This was the first time we’d progressed so far in this competition; we were the under-dogs...! People are often fooled by our team – we often turn up in dribs and drabs, with mismatching kit and occasionally we have to start with 5 players. And I think that Brighton might have fallen for this disguise. We ended up the proud owners of shiny gold medals, having beaten Brighton 41-25.

This season has been one of our most successful yet. We are the top of the ULU Premier League; the Manchester United of netball. (Proud owners of 2 gold medals!) We are also joint top in our BUCS league. And we’re in the league second from the top. The Imperial team are in 3B, which is 3 leagues below us. Incidentally, we also beat the Imperial team 46-25 at Varsity. Not really as close a game as they might’ve hoped... We also got to the final of the ULU cup and were unlucky to lose what was a close-match, with the other team having an 8th player in the form of their umpire. Though we can’t really complain about another medal, even if it is silver!

So I just want to thank all of the girls who’ve been so committed this year, particularly Cat Atkin, our oh-so-nearly-a doctor! Playing as much as we have, and as well as we have, and fitting in all of the other medical school obligations is tough. I’m the proudest and most grateful captain ever!