The much-anticipated Netball World Youth Cup 2025 (NWYC2025) Draw will take place live and be streamed globally on the Netball World Cup’s (NWC) YouTube channel from the host nation, Gibraltar, on Tuesday, 19th November 2024, at 8 pm CET/7 pm GMT.
Here’s a closer look at how the draw will be conducted:
Scrutineer
An independent scrutineer is appointed to monitor the draw process before it takes place and will oversee each step to ensure the process is followed.
The pre-qualified teams
The top four teams from the previous NWYC in 2017 pre-qualified for the NWYC2025, and these teams are seeded based on their final rankings from the 2017 event and are automatically placed into pools.
New Zealand, as the first-place team, will be placed in Pool A; Australia, as the second-place team, in Pool B; England, as the third-place team, in Pool C; and Fiji, as the fourth-place team, in Pool D.
As the host nation, Gibraltar also automatically qualified for the tournament, and their pool placement will be allocated at random into one of these four pools.
The draw process
To promote geographical diversity and a fair spread of teams, the draw is designed to ensure that teams from all World Netball Regions (Asia, Africa, Americas, Europe, and Oceania) are distributed across the pools.
After the top four teams from 2017 and the host nation are placed, the remaining 15 teams will be allocated based on their positions in Regional Qualifiers.
Teams are grouped by their finishing positions in these qualifiers: 1st place from each region (5 teams), 2nd place from each region (5 teams), and 3rd place from each region (5 teams).
Each group is allocated into pools in turn, commencing with the 1st placed teams.
Teams are randomly selected and placed into pools, following a “snake” pattern until all teams are placed into a pool.
The rules of the draw
This method follows strict rules to uphold the principles of fair distribution.
The draw process begins with the placement of teams that finished 1st in their region’s qualifier event. In this step, no two teams from the same region can be placed in the same pool. For instance, if the first team drawn is from Oceania, it cannot be placed in Pool D, where Fiji (also from Oceania) is seeded.
After all the 1st placed teams have been assigned, the same process is repeated for the 2nd placed teams and then the 3rd placed teams, although with these two groups they may be placed into a pool where a team from their region is already located. But, no more than two teams from any region should be in the same pool by the end of the draw process.
To further balance the pools, the process also ensures that no more than two teams ranked in the top six globally as of 1st March 2024 are in the same pool.
If issues arise, such as too many teams from one region ending up in a pool, the mistake will be fixed immediately.
This may involve swapping teams between pools to restore balance. If a fair distribution cannot be achieved, the entire draw process may be restarted to ensure that all principles are met.
This carefully structured draw process ensures distribution of teams from different Regions across the pools for NWYC2025, setting up a balanced and competitive tournament for netball fans worldwide.
To make sure you don’t miss out on the draw, subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel here.
You can also subscribe to our NWYC2025 mailing list now, here, to be the first to hear about all future announcements.
For more information, visit the event website at www.nwyc2025.gi.
