Proud To Be Pulse

Courtney Ferns, Co-Captain, London Pulse U19 blogs for The Netball Show.

It’s a new season and I am proudly wearing new colours at London Pulse. I joined the U19 squad in October and settled in quickly. The girls and coaches are fantastic and it was almost like coming home since I started on the pathway originally in the London and South East Regional squad. I’m also enjoying the shorter commute to training every week – it’s now a 20 minute drive as opposed to 2 and ½ hours.

The team trained hard from October until our first match in December against Manchester Thunder. I was definitely shocked but proud to be named Co-Captain with Kate. Kate and I are team mates at Turnford as well as Pulse and so it’s great to be able to do this together.

We knew the first match against Thunder would be a tough one but we were ready for it and excited to get the NPL season underway. It was a fantastic end to end game with both teams holding the lead along the way. In the end, the result went Thunder’s way but it was a close fought match and we were proud of the performance we put out in our first outing as a squad.

2019 didn’t end there though, as we had one more match before the Christmas break. We played our first home match of the season at Redbridge against North East. We definitely got off to a slow start in the first quarter but after some great quarter time advice from our coaches we came out firing and put out a tremendous performance to take the match 72-26.

We then took some time over Christmas to recharge and have fun but every one of the squad was still putting in effort to stay fit and ready over the break. I went skiing with the family and had an awesome time on the slopes, ready to hit the ground running when we got back to training.

We’ve been packing in the NPL matches already in 2020 having played another 3 matches. Luckily for us they have all been at home and all wins against Leeds Rhinos (53-36), Team Bath (76-45) and most recently against Severn Stars. The match against Severn Stars was a closely fought match and no doubt the roar of our supporters brought us home in the final quarter to take the win 57-44.

During this time I also competed in the Regional Round of National schools with St Edmund’s College. Another hard fought day of netball against some fantastic schools. We were very proud to become Regional Champions and are excited for National Finals in March.

Next up in the NPL, we face local rivals Saracen Mavericks on Feb 15th. I’m sure this will be another fiercely contested game and the entire squad is fired up for our next run out.