A love for teaching and development as well as a passion for sports has proven to be the best recipe for success for the new netball director at Worcester Gymnasium High School.
Nanette Olivier (33), who is no foreigner to the sports fraternity has stepped into a new role at the local high school since the beginning of the new school year.
With accolades such as being a former Spar Baby Proteas vice-captain as well as Stellenbosch University netball captain, it was inevitable that she would grab an opportunity like this with both hands.
Having taught in a traditional classroom for 10 years, Olivier rates this as her dream career.
“This job is without a doubt an answered prayer,” she said.
In her journey as physical education teacher, she realised that she does not only want to develop learners physically, she also wants to help them develop a life-long passion for sports.
“In physical education, teachers are expected to give learners marks for doing something they are not entirely interested in and I don’t want that. I want to help learners develop skills in a sport they love,” she said, elaborating on her position.
The new position at the local high school warrants Olivier a holistic approach to teaching the learners more than netball skills. According to the athlete and coach, sports can be used to teach learners life skills.
“So many doors opened for me by just playing netball and that is what I hope to bring to Worcester Gymnasium.”
She says that her success in the sport can be attributed to the opportunities that were presented to her through her participation in netball.
As a young girl who was born in Nelspruit and moved from one town to the other due to her father’s career as a bank manager and eventually found herself in Piketberg, her top priority is to instil a mentality to the learners that one does not have to come from a big town to create a name for themselves.
Despite coming from a family of sporting stars, her netball career took off at a much later stage of her life.
“I was a provincial gymnast and an avid ballet dancer when we moved to Piketberg, they did not have those sport codes, only rugby, netball and athletics and I was sort of thrown into netball.”
She shares further that she only really found her feet in the sport at the age of 16, when she was selected for the Boland team. From there, she put her foot on the accelerator and eventually co-captained the junior national team as well as the maroon machine.
Not only is she a player, she also knows and has mastered the rules of the game as an umpire and hopes to get her national accreditation certificate in the near future.
