Twenty-one of the country's top netballers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage gathered in Canberra last weekend.
On hand to mentor the rising stars was the first Indigenous woman to represent Australia, Marcia Ella-Duncan.
"This is like the culmination of a lot of years of trying to raise awarness about the barriers for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players. Yeah it's bit surreal, what is it like being here? I think it's a bit surreal, meeting all these brilliant young women is very rewarding and I feel really quite inspired by them so I'm really praying and hoping that they get some deeper understanding about high-performance requirements."
National team coach Lisa Alexander believes this camp is creating a legacy.
"I absolutely think this camp will unearth some Diamonds players. Even if it doesn't do that right now it will certainly set the platform for it in the future, which is what we wanted to do. In fact just in the last session I put out the challenge to the group to say, well you're the first group, you've got the responsibility of making sure that this camp keeps going and gets stronger and better every year."
The Diamonds coach wants to grow netball in Indigenous communities.
"I have Indigenous children myself and I just think it's the Australian way - if we're fair dinkum about reconciliation then we need to make sure that we're doing it in our sporting fields and I think we're doing that really well at Netball Australia. We've been a bit slow to get started but now that we are here we just want it to go from strength to strength and we need some assistance from corporate Australia to do that."
It was a valuable experience for players such as Beryl Friday, in learning what it takes to be a star on and off the court.
"I didn't realise how much emphasis there was put on other areas in our life. There's a lot of Netball, obviously, but just a lot of things about improving ourselves as people in our communities so that when we do go back home we can get involved and stand up as leaders for other Indigenous women or Indigenous people in general and be a bit like a role model for them."
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