OUR HISTORY

St Mary’s Old Girls Netball (SMOG) is one of the oldest and largest netball clubs in our region having celebrated our 75th Jubilee in July 2019.  We field approx.12 teams from Premier through to Senior grades, including 2 teams in the top Premier One competition in Wellington, and was once the largest netball club fielding up to 20 teams over a period of years. 

In recent times, we chose deliberately to reduce in size to ensure we continued to sustain a healthy club that was well governed, structured, organized and financially stable, currently our membership sits are approx. 130-140 members.  We have a wealth of members who specialize in professions that range from legal, medical, advisory, consultancy, tertiary, technology and financial, and just as important, we are privileged to have many stay-at-home mothers within our club who bring tremendous value also.

While we are a competitive club at the top end of the grades, we are also an establishment that welcomes women who want to remain active and engaged while connecting and forming new friendships.  Therefore, we field many senior teams, some who remain competitive and others purely for the social interaction through self-entered teams, as we strongly believe that these forms of positive engagement, is what makes SMOG as an attractive club to play for. 

In essence, we are a club that centres its core values upon inclusiveness, diversity, having fun and providing opportunities for young or old, the competitive or social, the beginner or more experienced and equally for our male counterparts through playing, coaching, managing, umpiring and administrative roles.  

Our Mission Statement for SMOG Netball has always been to focus upon having both competitive and social SMOG teams participate in each grade of the Wellington Netball competition, and ensuring these teams cater for all calibre of players and provides a strong sense of community and belonging through the sport of netball.  We pride ourselves upon being a “Club with the Edge” and that includes across all aspects of coaching, administration, representative honours, community engagement, governance and management.  

We do this through 3 key avenues:

“Provide an outstanding club Experience”

Offering a vibrant club environment where our members feel valued, engaged and respected both on and off the court in every interaction they have within SMOG. We strive to provide a strong sense of belonging for all our members where friendships are formed, social connections reach across all levels of the club and we embrace a family ethos where all are warmly welcome.

“High Performance Players and Teams”

We strive to identify, attract, develop and retain talented and high performance (representative) players, coaches and non-playing members. We ensure strong support mechanisms are in place to promote players and coach aspirations towards higher honours and the pathway is clearly defined that provides the best of opportunities for our HP members to become successful.

“Success of our Club”

Building a strong inclusive culture, providing opportunities, strengthening community connections and embracing diversity enables our members to develop, grow and enhance new/existing skills within an enjoyable, affordable and highly inclusive environment that encourages and promotes continual learning and recognises success comes in all forms.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​