Baby Proteas aim to unite ahead of upcoming series against Malawi

The 15-player squad was announced by Netball South Africa President Cecilia Molokane from the intense trials held at Laerskool Constantiapark in Pretoria over the weekend. 

Mthembu says testing the squad against Malawi will put the team in motion ahead of the Youth Netball World Cup in Gibraltar next year.

"First thing is playing against Malawi then moving forward they will be playing the Spar National Champs as a team. I think it's just a journey that we need to start, getting the girls to be in unity and getting into a stage or phase of being or motion of being in the World Cup journey," Mthembu said.

"I think the most important one is the series against Malawi. Malawi did put up a good fight against us during the qualifiers and I think they wanna try and test themselves against us but we have a totally different team to the one we had from the qualifiers. We lost some players because of age but I think it will be a good match for us."

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The Telkom Netball league remains the biggest feeder for the junior and senior national teams, Mthembu added that most players were recruited from the national league to attend the trials and also shared the criteria for the selection process.

"The criteria for the selection process was inviting players who we had seen at the Telkom Netball League. We invited those players which we thought had potential of being under Baby Spar Proteas squad. So, we bought them in from that process."