Life is like a game of netball

Back in my days as a brown-skirted schoolgirl, I used to play netball on Saturday mornings.

If you’re not from Australia, New Zealand or South Africa, you may not be acquainted with this sport. It’s sort of like no-contact basketball, without the dribbling. You can only take two steps while you’re holding the ball. You get to wear a pleated skirt and a bib labelled with your position. I was always GA — goal attack. I loved this, because at the time I was obsessed with The X-Files, and the notion of having Gillian Anderson’s initials emblazoned on my chest brought pure joy.

Anyway. I played on a school team for about a year when I was 13. We were, by all accounts, absolutely rubbish. Over the entire season, we did not win one game. But each contest tended to follow the same pattern: we’d start out seeming equal to our opponents. They’d get a goal; we’d get a goal. Then they might get two in a row, and we’d only get one. Gradually, we’d fall further and further behind.

At the beginning of the game, we were pretty casual about the score. We thought ourselves to be a bit too cool to be passionate about something lame like netball. We’d laugh off mistakes, and wouldn’t fight too aggressively for the ball. But by about the third quarter, we’d start to realise something: we were going to lose. And though we had seemed nonchalant and aloof at the beginning, we actually cared. We wanted to win.

At this point, we started to play harder. We’d take more risks, leap higher to try and fight off our opponents, and concentrate harder before sending the ball sailing toward the goal.

Each time we would gain back a bit of ground, but never enough to win. And each time I remember thinking, if only we’d played that hard from the beginning, we might have actually come out on top.

The lesson? Don’t wait until the third quarter to admit you actually give a damn about where things are heading. Care from the beginning. Put yourself on the line from the beginning. Otherwise it’ll probably be too late for you to win.