Countdown to the Netball World Cup: Player profile – Sharni Layton

With just three weeks to go until the tournament kicks off, everything is slowly falling into place in preparation for the tournament.

The scone recipes are being perfected, the cucumber crops are being carefully cultivated and the umpires are perfecting their stepping hand signals and reminding themselves not to be fooled by players holding their hands back at a slight angle to make their nails look shorter than they are.

Netball World Cup fixtures

Yes, it’s all systems go here in Sydney, so to get us in the mood for this veritable festival of netball, let’s take a look at the Australian Diamonds’ most colourful (and loudest) character, defender Sharni Layton.

Born in Melbourne (by try not to hold that against her) in 1988, her parents encouraged her to play netball because it seemed like a good way to get some peace and quiet each week while she attended training sessions and games.

They soon realised that the better she got, the more training sessions and games she would need to attend and the more energy she would expend, leaving her relatively subdued at home – and far less likely to pull out all the light fixtures in the house by swinging between the chandeliers as her primary mode of transport.

And so a legend was born. Making her debut for the Melbourne Kestrels in the National Netball League at just 17 years old, Layton immediately had whispers of something special. Or she would have, were it possible for ‘whispers’ and ‘Sharni Layton’ to exist in the same universe.

When the Trans-Tasman Netball League was formed in 2008, Layton naturally signed on with her hometown team, the Melbourne Vixens. However, one year in, she’d had enough. The reasons for her move weren’t always clear, however I have recently discovered the lyrics to the Vixens’ team song and suddenly it all makes complete sense.

While the entire song is fairly uniformly terrible, one particular part stood out.

We wear it true, Navy blue. That’s what we’re all about.
Victoria, Feel the pride. And let the fox come out.

I mean, come on. Imagine having to listen to (and possibly sing) that multiple times a season with a straight face. So traumatic was the experience that the young Layton chose to move to Canberra for a year at the AIS. Even with the lure of Questacon and the opportunity to be close to the lads from the University of Canberra Ultimate Frisbee team, that’s a pretty big call.

Fortunately, she made it through the year unscathed by frostbite and won a World Youth Championship to boot. Obviously, she could never return home while the Vixens held on to that team song, so the following year she headed off to the Adelaide Thunderbirds.

2010 was a great year for Layton, securing a starting seven place in the Thunderbirds line-up, taking out the Trans-Tasman Netball League Premiership and – most impressively of all – having the TTNL organisers invent an award specifically for her. Layton took out the Best Young Player Award for the season, which had the somewhat random criterion of players having to be under the age of 23 to receive it, which suited the 22-year-old Layton perfectly.

However, in 2011, things started to go pear-shaped. Layton’s beloved Thunderbirds decided it was time for a change of branding – having alienated the half of the state that really hated the Port Adelaide Power for long enough.

With a broad spectrum of colours available to them, the Thunderbirds inexplicably chose pink to embody their new brand. While that was enough to scare fellow ‘tough chick’ Mo’onia Gerrard away from the team, Layton was out to prove she was made of even tougher stuff and that real tough chicks wear pink.

However, after three more seasons, Layton realised she was at odds with the City of Churches and could no longer live among these quiet church mice. Where was a loud, brazen, life of the party lass to go, but Sydney? Well, considering there’s no Gold Coast team that is.

So, to the NSW Swifts team she went, where the crowd embraced her as their own, her Victorian heritage immediately erased, her story retold as the daughter of a Bondi lifeguard and a Manly ferry captain, who was raised on the mean streets of Coogee and loves waiting in line for hours to get gelato and complaining about traffic.

Despite playing her guts out, she was unable to secure her second premiership this season, but with her only remaining Australian options being Brisbane (more Queenslanders than the Gold Coast, but without the beaches) or Perth (latest tourism slogan ‘Home of the $7 coffee!’) she has decided to stick around for another season.

So what can we expect from Layton at the Netball World Cup? Well, we have already uncovered her plot to take over the tournament and impose the rules of Sharni-ball on all competing teams. (For those that missed it, it’s like netball but the game is played in 17 x 15 minute 17ths and attackers are penalised for touching the ball.)

However, security is well aware of this plot and extra staff have been added to thwart Layton and her band of loyal followers, also known as the ‘Sharni Army’.

So we must expect that she will be forced to play to the rules of plain old netball. In that case, here are three things we will definitely see from her in August.

1. She will hijack the MC’s microphone and hook it up to her uniform, thus allowing her to provide live commentary to the fans while playing. Opponents will grow increasingly frustrated at her ability to announce that she’s about to take an intercept and follow through on it.

2. She will cut Maria Tutaia’s ponytail off during warm-up, thus ridding her of her super powers.

3. She will make at least one opposition player cry during each game, culminating in the complete mental disintegration of the English team, whose mummies will all need to be flown over to convince the players that it’s safe to leave the change rooms.

Fortunately our wait is almost over and in 21 days we will see the awesome power of Sharni released over her fair, adopted city.

Do you have a player you would like to see profiled in the lead up to the Netball World Cup? Comment below – you never know your luck in the big city.