Jamaica’s male netballers face hosts in Americas Champs

The Jamaica Suns male netball team will take on South Africa in their opening match in the Americas Netball Championships in St Vincent and the Grenadines today. The game is scheduled to start at 6 p.m.

The championships, which will see five teams competing, started yesterday and will end on Sunday. The competing teams are South Africa, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada and the host nation.

Shawn Murdock, coach of the Suns, said that they are quite optimistic about their chances of winning the tournament.

“We are quite confident,” said Murdock. “I am excited but at the same time cautious because we haven’t played against any of these teams before. This is also new for us because this is the first time that we will be playing in a tournament like this but we are going out there to do our best. We have a very rounded squad because we have a very good set of guys and it wasn’t easy picking the final 12 players but this is a quite balanced team.”

He pointed out that he is quite happy with his team’s build-up to the tournament because the players have worked very hard on improving their game in practice.

“I am very pleased with the preparations of the team because we started training in March of this year but we played the Sunshine Girls last year and that went well for us,” Murdock said.

“We had a trial and we selected the team from there and so I am quite comfortable with things going into this tournament,” he said.

“We had time to work on things, we had time to work on synergies and to work on chemistry, and so the coaching staff is quite pleased with where we are before this championship,” Murdock stated.

The full squad: Captain Kurt Dale, Jovanni Dobson, Richard Hendricks, Omroy Kerr, Clifford Cameron, Marlon Daley, Naturi Jackson, Marlon McCallum,, Raj Brown, Anniff Foster, Javian Hall and Ramon Parkes.