Thilini Waththegedera: The Athletic Netballer
View(s):
Thilini in action
This is the fifth article in our series profiling the National Netball Team in the lead up to the Netball World Cup in July 2019. This week we feature Thilini Waththegedera who plays the Wing Attack and Centre.
Hailing from Theldeniya near Kandy, Thilini didn’t actually play netball at school. Instead, she focused on athletics and was picked to join the Provincial Kreeda Shakthi Programme because of her skills at 100m, 400m, long jump, and triple jump. She wanted to join the Airforce and in 2010 she started training and that same year she joined. From here her netball career saw an acceleration like no other: One year later she was selected to the National Pool, and in 2013 she made the National Team for the Nations Cup tournament held in Singapore! What an achievement!
It wasn’t an easy transition, and to Thilini’s credit, she used every opportunity between 2011 and 2013 to learn and develop and train hard. At 161cm, she is one of the shorter team members but she has clearly demonstrated her skills and proved a role model for shorter netballers across the world.
She was in the National teams for the 2014 Asian Championship, the 2015 World Cup, and the winning 2018 Asian Championship. She says, in 2018, the “team worked very hard to win and they wanted to inspire the future generation of netballers.” The current preparation for the World Cup is “very targeted, with very practical actions for each player to contribute towards the team goals.” She further comments that she “loves making intercepts” and this is a key skill that she has honed throughout training and on-court over the years.
Thilini recognises that “if you want to play (at the highest level) you need to love the game. Love and passion are required. You need to set targets. Do the hard work. Make sacrifices. There will be positives and negatives along the way but keep a positive mind. If you play netball you can go far and the satisfaction that comes from getting to the high points is well worth it.”
Thilini is grateful to the support she has received from her parents and sister, her athletics coach Gamini Premaratne, who laid the best foundation for her sporting career, her coaches from each school, all of her netball coaches, including Thilaka Jinadasa and Ruba Sumith Jayalal from the Airforce and the netballers she has played with over her career, as well as her friends.