KEY POINTS:
Former Silver Ferns captain Adine Wilson is loving her break from top netball.
Fans may be disappointed to learn that she hasn't missed the game one bit.
The 29-year-old played the last of her 79 tests in last year's world championship loss to Australia and will next year don the bib for the Southern Steel in the transtasman competition starting in April.
But in the 18-month break it's the baby's bib that is dominating life at the moment.
Harper, her 6 1/2-month-old son with husband and former All Black and cricket representative Jeff Wilson, means she has been "completely and utterly a mum".
The break from netball has been "awesome", Wilson said. "I haven't missed netball, it's just been brilliant. I can't believe I haven't missed it."
Wilson admits she might not be too sharp following the break from the top league, but says coach Robyn Broughton had a programme of games organised to bring her, and another new mother, Donna Wilkins, up to match fitness.
Neither is she eyeing a return to the Silver Ferns - the member of the 2003 world champions she says she doesn't feel there is any unfinished business on the netball court.
"I am not saying definitely not [play for the Silver Ferns], but I don't know if I would be good enough. The girls are playing brilliantly and I might not be up to speed."
But she has been up to speed getting into the field of New Zealand sporting biographies.
She has been travelling the country promoting her newly released biography Adine Wilson - Skills and Performance.
Wilson says publisher Hodder Moa had tapped her on the shoulder that there was space for such a publication. She says it's a combination of biography and instruction manual - containing some of the basic skills that give you an edge in netball.
The 182-pager was written with Ron Palenski - Wilson sat down with him and chatted about "life, netball and other stories".
She charts her rise from growing up in Hawera to last year's loss to Australia - and recollects the ups and downs of being selected for and dropped from national teams.
The book is liberally sprinkled with action photos from the netball court and the family photo album.
Wilson has also led an abbreviated career as a lawyer, but that has definitely been put on the back burner for now.
She picks her dream teams and coaches, for New Zealand and overseas, and also has a few ideas on how modern netball needs to change.
She laments some of the standard of international umpiring and says Australian and New Zealand coaches are far ahead of other countries.
There is little from Jeff himself about their high-profile relationship. Anyway, he wrote his own book, Seasons of Gold, also with Palenski, in 2000.
This is definitely Wilson's book and one for the fans.
- NZPA
