Netball in Vancouver

Vancouver's North Shore has its own netball club founded by South Africans. Anja Fouche and Ulandi Teubes co-founded the North Shore Netball club in 2004. Anja has been playing netball since she was 8 years old. Anja carried on playing netball when she moved to Canada. She was also a member of B.C. Netball's provincial open team which won a gold medal at the Canadian Amateur Netball Association's national championships. She was chosen to be a member of a Canadian netball development team that toured Australia in 2004.

The provincial emergence of the sport in the early 1980s is credited to Ann Willcocks, a Burnaby high school principal, who is a national and provincial team coach.

Dr. James Naismith is the Canadian who invented basketball for young men in 1890. In 1891 the 30-year-old Naismith moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. Not long afterwards, Clara Baer of H. Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans wrote to him asking for a copy of the rules. The reply included a diagram of the court across which Naismith had drawn two lines to indicate which areas players could cover. Baer misinterpreted them as restraining lines designating areas in which those players had to remain throughout the game, and on that misinterpretation, she created a new version of basketball for women - netball. The sport was taken to England in 1895 by a Dr. Toles or Toll, who was working with student teachers in Dartford. From there it spread to the British colonies, where it is still popular.