When Megan Nestor first arrived in Plainview, Texas, she was worried. First, she worried about the dry heat. Growing up on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Nestor was used to perfect beach weather: humidity, sunshine and blue skies.
Then she worried about finding the way. Nestor had never visited Wayland Baptist Church before. But now, in a few days, she won’t have to visit and can start classes.
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The only thing Nestor isn’t worried about is the sport she came to Texas to play. Although in hindsight, she should have been. Nestor received a scholarship and became a member of the basketball team. The only problem? She never played. In fact, she had never even watched the game on television.
“I just blindly agreed,” said Nestor, who now plays for North Texas. “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”
At home in St. Lucia, basketball “wasn’t really a thing,” she said. St. Lucia is famous for its paradise beaches, organic food, and dormant volcanoes, which you can drive right into the crater to visit. The island was once a British territory and gained independence in 1979, but has retained some aspects of British culture, including sports. One of those sports is netball.
Basketball is a global sport, but netball has a strong appeal for young girls and women in places like New Zealand, Australia, England and the Caribbean. Because of this, there are a number of female college basketball players who spent their childhood playing netball. Like Nestor, Columbia’s Ferris Henderson, Kentucky’s Amelia Hassett and UCLA’s Charles Ledger-Walker grew up playing netball.
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All four were successful as American basketball players. UCLA is the No. 2 team in the country, Leg Walker is at point guard, Hassett is a sharpshooter on a Kentucky team that has competed with the best teams in the SEC, Henderson’s Lions are among the best in the Ivy League, and Nestor has set numerous records this season, including 34 points and 31 rebounds.
Their basketball talent is undeniable. But so do the fundamental skills that netball provides.
“It helped in a lot of ways that I didn’t realize until my basketball career started taking off,” Hassett said.
When Henderson was a child in the Sydney suburb of North Curl Curl, she always knew where she would spend her Saturday mornings. Breakfast restaurants and coffee shops are packed with women and girls wearing spandex culottes and matching fitted tops. They wore uniforms and ponytails and walked down the street, all heading to the same place.
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“Saturday mornings are netball,” she said. “Literally everyone in Australia plays netball. You see everyone you know on the netball court. It brings the community together in a really good way.”
Netball and basketball are like cousins. They share genes, but at the end of the day, they are more different than similar. The first thing you notice about netball is the rim. As the name suggests, there is an edge with a net attached to a pole. Backplane not found.
“It looks kind of interesting,” Ledger-Walker said.
Just like basketball, the goal is to shoot the ball into the hoop. But in netball, players cannot dribble. They also have to give opposing players three feet of space, making blocking shots more difficult, and are limited to certain spots on the court. Each team consists of seven players, no physical contact is allowed, and the ball cannot be held for more than three seconds. The result is a game played in spaces similar to the concepts of forwards, midfielders and defenders used in football, mixed with the fast-ball movement of a three-man setup.
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Netball is often the first sport that Australian or New Zealand girls play unless they have played other sports before. Leger-Walker’s mum was an Olympic basketball player and her dad represented New Zealand in rugby, so her first sports were basketball and touch (like rugby without the tackles). In Albury, New South Wales, Hassett began playing hockey, like her mother, before eventually switching to basketball because her brother played basketball. But even mixed in with other sports, netball is almost inevitable.
“All my friends played basketball,” Hassett said. “So, of course, I joined in because I wanted to hang out with them.”
Ledger-Walker and Hassett both played basketball and basketball at the same time before coming to the United States to attend college. Basketball is their main sport, while netball remains a fun hobby to play with friends.
Henderson hadn’t even considered basketball until the coach of the local women’s team came to the netball court. The coach approached her mother and asked if Freese and her older sister Kitty, who also played at Columbia, were interested in trying basketball. At first, their mother refused without asking the girls.
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“She didn’t like the uniforms,” Henderson said with a laugh. “Because in netball you wear skirts. It took my mum a long time to get used to American styles, like long shorts.”
Like Legge-Walker and Hassett, Henderson played netball until college, but fell in love with basketball immediately.
“I love the freedom and physicality in basketball,” Henderson said. “How can you take the ball away from someone else and how the game moves so fast.”
Nestor was against basketball for the same reason.
She started playing netball in primary school and is a natural talent. She quickly progressed through school basketball and by the time she was 11, Nestor was playing for her country with girls aged 16 and over.
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Her stepfather, who lives in Connecticut, tried to get Nestor to try basketball, but she wasn’t interested. She wanted to be a professional netball player and told him there was too much contact with basketball. She would never play such an aggressive sport.
“But,” Nestor laughed, “there’s a plot twist!”
In 2021, Nestor received calls from two jobs asking her to represent Saint Lucia at the Netball Championships. The calls she received were not unusual. But after the game, she received another call that was both unexpected and life-changing.
Wayland-Baptiste head coach Jason Cooper is in desperate need of a rebounder. Nestor is 6ft 4in and possesses a keen nose – at least when it comes to netball – which is enough for Cooper. He was optimistic that he could turn her into a basketball player.
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Of course, Cooper couldn’t have known that Nestor had vowed never to participate in such an “aggressive” sport. But the promise of a full scholarship changed her mind, and within days she was on a plane to Texas.
“Because of my upbringing and where I come from, I know how difficult it is to get an opportunity like this,” Nestor said. “So I jumped at it right away. But I didn’t treat the opportunity like basketball. I really treated it like school.”
Basketball was just something she had to do to get an education. As a freshman, Nestor spent more time hauling equipment on the school bus than on the court, playing just 47 minutes all season. When Henderson made the switch from netball to basketball, she was surrounded by younger players and an equally inexperienced group of teammates. Nestor didn’t have the same luxury.
“I didn’t know the basketball game; I didn’t know we traded defenses,” Nestor said. “I didn’t know what a foul was. I didn’t even know we switched sides at halftime.”
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Nestor has the most difficulty with the ball because dribbling doesn’t exist in netball. She didn’t get the hang of it until her junior season. Nestor was a star netball player, but as a basketball player she barely got any reps in her first season. It was a difficult adjustment, and Nestor spent hours on the phone with his mother discussing the same question: “What am I doing here?”
But during her sophomore year, things changed. Nestor realized that even if she only played a minute or two, she could have an impact. A rebound here, a steal there, the basket – rebounds and so on. When she had her first double-double, Nestor found that not only was she getting better at basketball, but she was starting to enjoy it.
She is officially a basketball player.
After setting a record at NAIA Wayland Baptist, Nestor transferred to North Texas and now has his sights set on playing professional basketball.
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“People always ask me if I wish I had started playing basketball sooner,” Nester said. “But if I did, maybe I wouldn’t be who I am now. Maybe I wouldn’t even be who I am now.”
Nestor wasn’t the only one to think this way. Henderson, Hassett and Leg Walker all credit netball with making them stronger basketball players. Netball helps them learn to move without the ball, how to cut into space and how to anticipate and intercept passes.
It’s also a selfless game. With players restricted to certain spaces on the court, not everyone gets the glory of scoring or the excitement of blocking a shot. There are no one-on-one situations in netball.
“You literally can’t play in a netball game without seven players,” Henderson said. “It helped me embrace my role in basketball because I never felt the urge to do it all.”
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Every former netball player has discovered a passion for basketball, but they are not opposed to playing netball again. Both Henderson and Hassett said if they moved back to Australia they would probably play with friends, like they did as children.
For Nestor, the appeal was greater.
“I’ll never forget netball,” she said. “Never. Netball is my first love.”
But basketball is her current passion. For now at least, Nestor prefers dribbling, long “American” shorts and a hoop with a backboard.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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