Fighter. Winner. Champion.
Robinson’s parents wanted her to stay active. So after playing every sport as a junior, she settled on basketball and netball side by side.
She openly admits though that her first few years, she was “the dud of all duds”.
“I didn’t have that passion for
it,” says Robinson.
“But after doing the netball routines and dancing around the netball posts, something clicked. I was about nine or ten and after that, you couldn’t get the ball out of my hands.”
However, Robinson continued to double up between basketball and netball. Then in 2006, she was called up to trial for the Kestrels, leaving a family holiday in the process.
“I didn’t look back after that. I
had state basketball training and I asked if I could leave early and they were like “nah” and that was it.
“It was a pretty good choice really. And I always say, I believe netball chose me.”
If netball did choose her, it made her work for it. Throughout her career, she’s had to push herself and it’s that moment in 2010, as highlighted previously, that made her become very competitive.
“I took a couple of days out and said to myself, okay, I didn’t make it to the Commonwealth Games, I might never make one, do I still want to do this and how do I do it?”
It paid off. The desire to be a winner led Robinson to become
one of the premier wing attacks in the country, making the ANZ All Stars team three years running.
And in 2014, it perhaps accumulated in her greatest year in the sport: a Championship winning player with the Vixens (a moment she said she worked hard for nine years and was fantastic to win it that group of girls), and also a Commonwealth Games gold medalist.
The pressure was enormous, Robinson says, especially after the Diamonds had failed to win Gold in the past twelve years. Yet, she revelled in the atmosphere, because she’d become the winner she’d been working hard to become.
“There was an expectation [to win it] as the Diamonds hadn’t won it for 12 years.
“But I knew with this group of girls, we were going to do anything it took to win. For the last 18 months, we’ve bonded and worked hard as team, so to finally win gold, was amazing.”
“And in 2014, it perhaps accumulated in her greatest year in the sport."