Netball's Institutional History: A Misread Diagram, a World Cup and a Fifty-Year Olympic Campaign
Netball is one of the most-played women's team sports in Britain, Ireland and across the Commonwealth, and one of the least well documented in general sports writing. Its institutional history is genuinely unusual: a sport created by accident, spread by a school system, governed internationally for decades, and still not an Olympic sport.
A Sport That Began as a Misreading
Basketball was invented in the United States in 1891. The standard account of what happened next runs like this. Clara Baer, a physical education teacher in New Orleans, wrote to James Naismith for a copy of the rules. The material she received included a court diagram with lines pencilled across it, indicating the areas different players might best cover. Baer read those lines as fixed boundaries that players could not leave, and a zoned version of the game followed.
That story is repeated everywhere, and it is worth flagging that it is disputed. Some historians of the sport regard it as too neat, and recent scholarship treats netball's emergence as a transnational process with several contributors rather than a single misunderstanding. The zoning is real and it is what distinguishes the sport; the anecdote explaining its origin should be held loosely.
How It Reached England
The route into Britain is better documented. Martina Bergman-Österberg, a Swedish physical education instructor who founded the first physical education college for women in England, returned from a visit to the United States in 1893 and introduced a version of basketball to her students in Hampstead.
Her students then modified the rules over several years, with substantial revisions following a visit in 1897 from an American teacher who brought further women's basketball rules with her. The game that resulted was given a new name: net ball.
The distribution mechanism matters more than the invention. Bergman-Österberg was training physical education teachers, and those teachers carried the game into schools across Britain and, through the school systems of the British Empire, into Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. That is why netball's world map still looks the way it does, and it is also, as we will come to, the sport's central Olympic problem.
The World Championships
International competition arrived in 1963. The first World Netball Championships were held in Eastbourne from 2 to 14 August that year, contested by eleven teams, played outdoors at the Chelsea College of Physical Education, and run as a full round robin — every team played ten matches.
Australia won all ten and became the first world champions, with New Zealand second and England third. The tournament was known as the World Netball Championships until 2011 and has been the Netball World Cup since 2015.
Australian dominance has been the defining feature ever since. Of the sixteen tournaments held up to and including 2023, Australia have won twelve. The 2023 edition in Cape Town was the first held in Africa; Australia beat England 61-45 in the final, in England's first appearance in a World Cup final, with Jamaica third and New Zealand fourth.
The Commonwealth Games
Netball appeared as a demonstration sport at Auckland in 1990 and joined the full Commonwealth Games programme at Kuala Lumpur in 1998, with twelve teams competing.
Its defining Commonwealth moment came at Gold Coast in 2018, when England beat Australia 52-51 in the final with a Helen Housby goal scored as the clock expired. England's best previous results had been bronze medals in 1998, 2006 and 2010, and the result is still generally regarded as the largest upset in the sport's history.
Netball was on the programme again for Glasgow 2026, staged at the Hydro across late July and early August, featuring the world's top twelve ranked nations across thirty-eight matches.
Recognised, But Not Included
Here is the anomaly. The sport's international federation, now World Netball, has been recognised by the International Olympic Committee since 1995, following roughly two decades of lobbying. Netball has never been contested at a Summer Olympic Games.
Recognition and inclusion are two different things, and the distinction is worth explaining properly to a young player who has heard netball described as an Olympic sport. IOC recognition of a federation opens access to certain funding streams from the IOC, national Olympic committees and governments. It does not put the sport on the programme.
The obstacle usually cited is geographical spread. The IOC's criteria for programme inclusion set thresholds for the number of countries in which a sport is widely practised, and netball's strength remains concentrated in Commonwealth nations — the direct legacy of how it spread in the first place. Campaigning has continued for more than fifty years and is currently focused on Brisbane 2032.
The Game in Britain and Ireland Now
The domestic picture in Britain changed recently and significantly. England Netball relaunched its top domestic competition as a professionalising Netball Super League from the 2025 season: the number of teams was reduced from ten to eight, Birmingham Panthers and Nottingham Forest came in as new franchises, squad sizes were cut from twelve registered players to ten, minimum salaries were more than doubled, and around half of all fixtures were scheduled into major arenas. Several long-established clubs, Team Bath among them, did not make the cut.
In Ireland the game sits at a different point on the same curve. The Republic of Ireland side, nicknamed the Emeralds, competes under Europe Netball, plays in competitions such as the Europe Netball Open Challenge, and was ranked twenty-ninth in the world rankings as of September 2025. Ireland have appeared at four World Cups, finishing tenth on two occasions, in 1979 and 1991.
For a young player in Ireland or Britain, the practical consequence is that the pathway is real but uneven, and knowing which competitions and structures actually exist matters more here than in a sport with a settled route to the top.
All seven positions role by role, the passing, catching, shooting and footwork fundamentals with fault corrections, attacking and defensive structures, and the full England Netball and Netball Ireland pathways are covered in Netball To Succeed, part of the To Succeed Sports & Fitness series.