T&T women's net­ball team goal-keep/goal-de­fence Daystar Swift has signed to play for North­ern Stars in the 2020 Trans-Tas­man Net­ball League (ANZ) Pre­mier­ship se­ries in New Zealand, join­ing fel­low na­tion­al Kali­fa Mc Collin in the six-team com­pe­ti­tion.

Stand­ing at 1.91 me­tres tall, Swift, 27, has rep­re­sent­ed T&T 41 times, made her World Cup de­but in 2015 in Aus­tralia and is al­so part of the team which left ear­li­er this week for the 2019 Net­ball World in Liv­er­pool, Eng­land, which starts next week.

Reached for com­ment, Swift said, "I'm ex­cit­ed about get­ting an op­por­tu­ni­ty to learn a dif­fer­ent cul­ture, meet new peo­ple and most im­por­tant­ly play net­ball at a high­er lev­el."

How­ev­er, the soft-spo­ken Swift ad­mit­ted it wasn't an easy de­ci­sion for her.

"It was not an easy de­ci­sion for me to ac­cept this coun­try con­sid­er­ing I have a young daugh­ter. How­ev­er, hav­ing the sup­port sys­tem that I have was def­i­nite­ly a con­tribut­ing fac­tor for me to ac­cept the con­tract and I in­tend on mak­ing every­one proud," she said.

North­ern Stars coach Kiri Wills says Swift will bring some much-need­ed height in­to the de­fen­sive cir­cle, not­ing this is key to be­ing com­pet­i­tive in the mod­ern era.

Fo­cus­ing in on this, Swift said it was im­por­tant that T&T al­so ad­justs its own coach­ing pro­grammes and game plans to counter what is be­ing done in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.

“The con­tin­ued pref­er­ence for teams both na­tion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly to con­tract and de­vel­op taller and taller shoot­ers re­quires a sim­i­lar re­sponse and we need to be able to coun­ter­act that.”

For next sea­son, the North­ern Stars have re-signed Ma­ia Wil­son, Mi­la Reuelu-Buchanan, Storm Purvis and Kate Bur­ley from the side who went down to the Cen­tral Pulse by four goals in the 2019 ANZ Pre­mier­ship grand fi­nal.

Last month, Mc Collin al­so signed with the As­cot Park Ho­tel South­ern Steel for the ANZ Pre­mier­ship sea­son from Celtic Drag­ons of the Vi­tal­i­ty Net­ball League in Eng­land.

The six-team ANZ Cham­pi­onship al­so in­cludes WBOP Mag­ic, Main­land Tac­tic and North­ern Mys­tics.