Promotion beckons for Harcourts

Harcourts will earn themselves promotion to division one of the regional superleague netball competition if they beat Rimutaka at Taita on Saturday.
The top two division teams after this weekend's matches will replace the bottom two division one sides in the premier section and right now there are no guarantees over who they will be.
Remarkably, Harcourts, Rimutaka, PIC 2 and Wellington Girls College are all at the top of the points table with the identical record of three wins and one loss.
And even more remarkably this Saturday's draw sees them involved in what are virtual mini finals, Harcourts against Rimutaka and PIC 2 against Wellington Girls College.
Which means that, barring draws, the winners of those games will be promoted to division one and, conversely, the losers will remain in division two.
Harcourts coach Kelly Sargent concedes she was "pretty confident" of her side having too many guns for Rimutaka until hearing they walloped PIC 2 by a whopping 32 goals last weekend, 54-22.
It was a result which, on the face of it, did not bode well for Harcourts who had lost by a comfortable margin to PIC 2 earlier in the competition but the typically frank Sargent wonders whether there was more to it than meets the eye.
"No way could you imagine them (Rimutaka) winning by that sort of scoreline with everything being equal so it's a bit of a mystery how, or why, it happened," Sargent said. "Maybe the other team had injuries or sickness, no doubt it will all come out in the wash."
One thing Sargent does know for certain though, her Harcourts squad - or "country bumpkins" as she laughingly calls them - are determined to join the big guns in division one, despite the knowledge the opposition there will another notch or two above what they have been meeting over the past month.
"We went into this competition with the idea of pushing hard to make division one, and nothing has changed in that respect," she said. "We're now just one win away and will be doing everything we can to pull it off."
With promotion on the line Sargent agrees she is unlikely to follow the same approach as she has during the big wins scored over Taita and Kapiti over the past two weekends.
Then she has gone out of her way to give every player in her squad ample court time but against Rimutaka the likelihood is she will stay with her first-string line-up for most of the game, or at least until victory is in safe keeping.
The one worry fitness-wise for Harcourts is the knee injury which the feisty Emma Foote has been battling and while Sargent is optimistic of her being able to play she has also to make contingency plans just in case she is ruled out.
If that happens the options at her disposal are to either to replace Foote with Amy Lucas or to make positional changes which would see the versatile Geraldine Carroll moved out of her usual shooting position and talented youngster Waimarama Phillips start in that role.
Whoever takes the court though Sargent has no doubts they will need to fight fire with fire as Rimutaka are a side who play a very physical style of netball.
"They try to get in your head by pushing the contact rules to the limits and we have to play tough as well as smart," she said.
"Take a step backwards and they'll run all over us."