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Veronica Gwaze

Sports Reporter

WHEN ZRP Mambas and former senior netball national team goal shooter Pauline Jani walked on the court in 2021, just after a two-year Covid-19-induced break, she was overweight and her career seemingly not so bright.

Weighing 114kg, the 32-year-old towering GS was visibly out of shape and completing a 60-minute match was simply a huge task for her.

Having retired from international netball in 2019 after the World Netball Cup in Liverpool, England, ending a glittering globe trot, one would assume Jani would soon also hang her boots from local netball.

And yet, a season later, the netballer is down to 88kgin a weight loss journey she reckons as tough.

Jani also leads the Rainbow Amatuer Netball League charts with five golden hands and 367 shots in five outings ahead of Tenax’s Maud Chisora who stands at 303.

“I had thought of calling time on my career and for weeks that was the plan but one day, I thought of how I would have disappointed my late mother and a whole lot of others who looked up to me for inspiration,” she said.

“I told myself that I needed to defy the odds, I embarked on a weight loss journey so I start my day with a jog at 5am followed by an intensive work-out before attending my training sessions at Morris Depot netball grounds.”

After her every day training session, Jani puts in some extra hours to focus on her shots and endurance.

Last year, she was the toast of the season, bagging the Rainbow Netball Amateur League golden hand.

Prior to that, she had also emerged the golden hand winner for the RANL Dry Season Tournament.

This season, after six outings, she tops the table and seems to have gained a rare sting as she scribbles a colourful script of her life.

Jani believes this year, she will be the toast yet again and that she still has a lot to offer in her career.

“I believe everything in the game starts in the mind and attitude, it is all about telling yourself that you can and putting on the best attitude to achieve that,” she said.

“My target is 90 scores per game, I am working hard and it is paying off because I am improving by the day, I still have so much to offer and I am giving it my all…”

Jani has also erased her “bad-girl” tag which stuck to her for malingering in camp.

With her fine performances on court, renewed passion for the game, the renowned star is also contemplating coming out of retirement on international netball.

“I want to do it for my mother,” she recalled how her mother, Irene Masara, spotted her potential as a seven-year-old.

“When I got my Grade One third term report, in 1996, my mother said to me ‘Pauline academics are not your thing but with your height, take netball seriously you will make a good player someday’.

“I was too young to understand her by then but when I got a Pamushana High School scholarship, everything started to make sense.

“When both my parents passed away, life took a nasty turn and had it not been for netball, I do not know where I would be now.”

She recalls how after her father and mother passed away in 2006 and 2007 respectively, life became difficult for her and her younger brother, Mike.

Her love for netball was put to test several times. During her days in Grade Seven she struggled to stay in school due to financial woes.

And when Pamushana gave her a scholarship, she felt a door had opened.

However, although the school would provide for all her needs, her heart was always with her younger brother whom she had left under their uncle’s care.

“I then got my first Gems call-up at Form Two and that was a moment to live my dream,” she chuckled.

As fate would have it, when she was in Form Four, she received a message alerting her that her younger brother was being ill-treated.

Jani escaped from school and became a ‘‘freezit’’ vendor in Masvingo to keep a closer eye on her brother.

Fortunately fate intervened and she, later, was back on school courts making a name for herself. In 2008, she signed for Gaths Mine before moving to Shangani Mine the following year and Railstars netball club by the end of that year.

Later Jani was to move to Hwange Netball Club then ZPS Hwange.

It is during her stint at the coal mining town club that she was spotted by the Zimbabwe Republic Police.

“I joined the police team and later got a job within the police force in 2010,” said Jani who is now a constable at ZRP Headquarters.