Charlotte Manley could well have become a crane driver, a competitive sprinter, or a psychologist.
Instead, she chose netball – and now she’s making herself indispensable at the back of the court for the Mystics.
The 21-year-old defender’s rise this ANZ Premiership season has been rapid. But it’s come after serious health setbacks over the past two seasons – and a moment where she almost walked away from the game after leaving school.
It’s a little bittersweet, too. Manley has stepped up for the Mystics in the absence of her team-mate and friend, Silver Fern defender Catherine Hall, who required surgery after jamming her foot against the goalpost a month ago.
As the Mystics go into Saturday’s ANZ Premiership grand final as favourites against the gritty Steel, Manley is preparing to play a pivotal role for the three-time champions.
“No one wants to see their friend or team-mate get injured, especially Cat,” she says. “There are no hard feelings there at all. She’s so supportive – she’ll quietly say to me, ‘Scotty, you need to do this’.”
Manley’s nickname comes from her Glaswegian mum, who played netball in Scotland.
“It’s been exciting to really step up and prove to myself that I’m my own player,” the New Zealand U21 player says.
The one problem Manley has, Mystics assistant coach Rob Wright says, is she doesn’t realise the extent of her talent.
“I keep telling her she doesn’t know how good she is – she’s going to be a star,” he says. “She’s so athletic, and her speed across the ground is electric.
“Her closing speed is her real strength – she reminds me of [former Australian Diamond] Julie Corletto. She will say ‘I don’t know if I’m very quick’, but it’s phenomenal how fast her feet are.”
Manley’s breakout moment, Wright says, came in the Mystics’ 57-51 win over the Stars, when she first stepped into Hall’s shoes. Her two intercepts, two rebounds and seven deflections earned her player of the match.
“What I love most about her is she’s real comfortable in her own skin,” he says. “She’s quirky and different, and happy to be herself.”
If she hadn’t stuck with netball, Manley reckons she could have been a dab hand at driving trucks and cranes. Her dad, Deane, is the founding director of NZ Crane Hire, where Manley works part-time in the office. “I’d make a really good crane operator,” she says.
She started studying for a business degree three years ago, then switched to psychology. “But I was self-diagnosing by the second week,” she says. Next semester, she plans to start again studying human nutrition and exercise science, extramurally through Massey University.
That choice of study is no coincidence. Last year, Manley found herself battling RED-S syndrome, a condition where athletes don’t eat enough to balance the energy they expend. She became aware of it after repeated injury niggles, bouts of illness and no menstrual cycle.
“I realised I hadn’t had a cycle in a year-and-a-half, and I wasn’t eating well – like one meal a day at one point,” says Manley, who came off the bench in five Mystics games last season. “The workshops we do around RED-S and low energy availability are really helpful, but I didn’t realise how deep I was in it. It’s exactly why I want to get into nutrition.”
Manley also underwent major surgery for debilitating endometriosis two years ago – setting her back in her first season as a Mystics training partner. “I was trying to get back on the court, but I could barely run, I couldn’t hold myself upright, and that was really hard for me,” she says. “I didn’t realise the reaction my body would have to such invasive surgery.
“But the team management were so supportive, altering my trainings and helping me get my confidence to jump again. Now I’m such an advocate for young women to get checked out for endo.”
This season, though, has been illness and incident-free – and full of opportunity. Typically a goal keep, Manley is enjoying the challenge of playing at goal defence.
“That used to scare me – I always liked being in the back. But the more I talk to Rob [Wright] about it, the more I realised that’s where I will end up as I keep playing. I definitely feel like I can do more out there than back in the circle. So I’ll keep at it,” she says.
The prospect of Manley and Hall shoring up the Mystics defence in future makes both Wright and Manley happy.
“I am really excited for Cat to come back,” she says. “We can switch back and forth between goal defence and goal keep just to keep our opposition on their toes.”
Hall, a year older, first played with Manley in the Northern Marvels, the Mystics’ feeder side, in 2023. “We were together in the circle and we’d often flip around,” says Manley, who then played for Auckland with Hall and was first fully contracted to the Mystics last season.
“She’s my closest friend in the team so being able to go on this journey with her, and follow on similar stepping stones, has been really inspiring for me.”
Manley is also thankful to Mystics veteran goal keep Phoenix Karaka and wing defence and captain Michaela Sokolich-Beatson for supporting her make the transition mid-season from a bench player to a starting circle defender.
“Phoenix has been my anchor, helping me get my confidence and get my footing at goal defence,” she says. “It’s cool to see Phoenix is still learning things in her career, so it reassures me it’s okay I haven’t learned everything yet.”
Both Manley’s parents were netballers – her mum played in Scotland, while her dad played indoor netball here. Her brother Cameron, though, was a track cyclist who won Oceania medals riding for New Zealand.
She first played netball at six with Auckland club College Rifles – but it was one of many sports she had a go at. “At Meadowbank Primary, I didn’t get to go to AIMS Games in netball, but I thought I just played it for fun,” she says.
Yet her father reminded her just last week that as a 10-year-old, she ran home from school with the news that Irene van Dyk had retired from international netball: “I said I’m going to be the next Silver Ferns goal shoot. It’s my time.’ I was clearly delusional – I’m not a shooter.
“But maybe one day, fingers crossed, I’ll be a Silver Fern at the other end of the court.”
When she reached high school at Saint Kentigern College, Manley was torn between netball and athletics. An exceptional sprinter, she ran 27.11s for 200m in Whanganui in 2018 – earning an age-group world ranking.
The decision was made for her not long after that run, when she dislocated her knee in a 400m race, and never returned to her original form. “I realised I didn’t love running that much, it was quite a lonely sport,” she says.
When she was invited to the New Zealand secondary schools netball camp, but didn’t make the team, she feared her netball career was over, too. “It was quite hard at the time, because I had a coach who’d just told me I wouldn’t make it out of secondary school netball,” she recalls. “Both of those things put up a big barrier for me.”
But she was grateful when her high school coach, Natalie Milicich – who’d also coached Singapore and Auckland – encouraged her to try out for the Marvels in the National Netball League.
“She knew I’d struggled mentally with netball and with my own mental health issues and she really pushed me to try out. So I can thank her for being here in a way, because I probably would have just stopped, or been happy to play club netball,” she says.
Manley is also grateful to her high school team-mate, Khanye-Lii Munro-Nonoa, a Steel defender who she will come up against this weekend. “We still have each other’s backs, we still talk about how hard training is,” she laughs.
They’ve made a tight-knit group of friends with the New Zealand U21 side who won silver at last year’s World Youth Cup in Gibraltar – alongside six other premiership players like Amelia Walmsley, Laura Balmer, Kate Taylor and Serina Daunakamakama.
“We all keep in contact every day,” Manley says, “which shows how friendships that come out of netball are so important in our lives.”
