Af­ter years of be­ing win­less in youth net­ball re­gion­al­ly, the T&T's Un­der-16 Net­ball team re­turned home to rous­ing ap­plause at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port on Fri­day night, fol­low­ing their sec­ond-place fin­ish at the Caribbean Net­ball As­so­ci­a­tion Jean Pierre Un­der-16 Cham­pi­onship at the YM­CA Court in An­tigua.

On­ly re­gion­al neme­sis Bar­ba­dos pre­vent­ed what could have been a clean sweep of the ti­tles at stake in the tour­na­ment.

Oth­er­wise, the TT net­ball princess­es, who were led by in­spi­ra­tional cap­tain and goal shoot Keleli­cia George gained the li­on's share of awards, re­tain­ing the open­ing team shoot-out com­pe­ti­tion with George se­cur­ing the top in­di­vid­ual po­si­tion with 56 goals from 74 at­tempts, while team­mates Jil­lisa Brig­gs and new­com­er Sha­nia Shortt took third and fourth places re­spec­tive­ly with sim­i­lar records of 42 from 67 and 42 from 57.

De­fend­er and vice-cap­tain Des­tiny Williams was vot­ed the most valu­able play­er while George al­so walked away with the awards for the most ac­cu­rate shoot­er and the shoot­er with the high­est num­ber of goals. Oth­er tro­phies achieved in­clud­ed: Most ac­cu­rate shoot­ing team; Chal­lenge Tro­phy for re­tain­ing the team shoot-out; best team spir­it; and the tro­phy for fin­ish­ing as run­ners-up.

The late ar­rival of their lug­gage on an open­ing day al­so pre­vent­ed the girls from re­tain­ing the tro­phy for the best team on pa­rade, man­ag­er Coreen David ex­plained.

She al­so told Guardian Me­dia Sports that had it not been for the trau­ma caused by the late ar­rival of the lug­gage on the open­ing night against the Bar­ba­di­ans, the re­sult may have been dif­fer­ent.

The T&T girls have nev­er won the tour­na­ment de­spite end­ing as run­ner up in the first two years in 1998 and 1999 be­hind re­gion­al gi­ants Ja­maica. And since then it has been a strug­gle for the TT princess­es to se­cure a place in the top three. On­ly last year T&T made a ma­jor im­prove­ment by fin­ish­ing fourth.

Coach Vel­ma Hazel­wood, flanked by her play­ers, par­ents and oth­er sup­port­ers, said her girls need­ed this achieve­ment to emerge from the hole the sport has been in for many years.

"It's sort of his­toric be­cause we haven't placed in the top three for a while and this has cer­tain­ly been a good sea­son for the girls. Goals were set and they came through. The tour­na­ment was an ex­cit­ing one, some of the games were nail-bit­ing but they stayed fo­cused and achieved the goals we set, be­cause we re­al­ly need­ed to be in the top three as net­ball has been at a low for the past years, so we re­al­ly need­ed to get out of that hole in terms of youth play," Hazel­wood ex­plained.

"We were ex­pect­ing to come out on top in the team shoot again be­cause it was some­thing they were trained for and they did it well," the coach not­ed.

David said af­ter­wards the win was a ma­jor state­ment from her team as fund­ing has al­ways been a prob­lem for them and they have had to strug­gle to be where they want to be. "We were able to get this done with very lit­tle fund­ing. We got some help at the last minute, Re­pub­lic Bank was very help­ful in this en­deav­our, they were able to fund at least few of the girls' tick­ets to get there, as well as a few oth­er funds we got from the Sport Com­pa­ny of T&T."

Up­on their re­turn, the team will go on a much-need­ed break as some of the girls will be shift­ing their fo­cus to the CSEC ex­ams.

David said some three or four of the girls will be re­tained for next year, but the ma­jor­i­ty will move up to the un­der-21 di­vi­sion, while oth­ers can com­mand a place on the Se­nior Women's team for the World Net­ball Cham­pi­onship in Liv­er­pool in Ju­ly.

In the mean­time, scout­ing for new un­der-16 tal­ent will be­gin soon.