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Burta De Kock - Head Coach of UFS Netball
Burta de Kock has been re-elected to serve on the new World Netball Coaching Advisory Panel.
Burta de Kock, the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Netball Head Coach since 2002, has been elected to serve on the new World Netball Coaching Advisory Panel. 

De Kock, whose coaching career spans the past three decades, has coached the Kovsie Netball team, the national South African Proteas, as well as the South Africa Under 23s in the past twenty years. 

Under her leadership, Kovsie Netball is the university team that has won the most gold medals and produced 18 brilliant South African Protea players, with Refiloe Nketsa as the latest Kovsie Protea player. Moreover, the university has also won several Varsity Netball competitions, as well as other titles like USSA and Varsity Netball.

Currently, she is still coaching the Kovsie Netball team and the Free State A team in the SA Spar Championships.

Fifth year serving on the panel

De Kock describes her reappointment to the World Netball Coaching Advisory Panel as a great honour. This will be the fifth year that she will serve on the panel. 

According to a statement by World Netball, the panel will advise the World Netball CEO, Clare Briegal, and the board. The structure, consisting of nine members – with Dr Anita Navin as Chair, will be working with the board to support the development and implementation of agreed priorities in the World Netball Strategic Plan, particularly focusing on driving the development of quality coaches and coaching worldwide.

As a South African serving on this international platform, De Kock believes she brings a way of thinking from the African side of netball. 

As a result of the direct contact with international teams and coaches that this platform brings, she looks forward to making use of this opportunity to learn from them, to share information, and to develop successful players and coaches at universities, both locally and internationally.

Learn from one another 

She also believes that her exposure to international teams and coaches can provide valuable guidelines to Kovsie Netball – with their unique style – on where they need to adapt to enhance their performance and win games against international teams such as Australia, New Zealand, and England. 

In addition, she is also excited about connecting the university with international institutions and clubs. “This is how we grow. We can learn from each other and serve Africa,” she says. 

News Archive

Transformation in higher education discussed at colloquium
2013-05-16

16 May 2013

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The University of the Free State hosted the Higher Education Transformation Colloquium earlier this month on the Bloemfontein Campus.

On Monday 6 May 2013 till Wednesday 8 May 2013 the event brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including some members of university councils; vice-chancellors; academics and researchers; leaders of student formations and presidents of student representative councils; transformation managers; executive directors with responsibility for transformation in various universities, members of the newly established Transformation Oversight Committee and senior representatives from the Department of Higher Education and Training.

The event examined and debated some of the latest research studies and practices on the topic, as well as selected case studies from a number of public universities in South Africa.

Delivering a presentation at the colloquium, Dr Lis Lange, Senior Director of the Directorate for Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the UFS, said transformation in South Africa has been oversimplified and reduced to numbers, and the factors that might accelerate or slow the process have not been taken into account.

Dr Lange was delivering a paper, titled: The knowledge(s) of transformation: an archaeological perspective.

Dr Lange argued that “in the process of translating evolving political arguments into policy making, the intellectual, political and moral elements that shaped the conceptualisation of transformation in the early 1990s in South Africa, were reduced and oversimplified.”

She said crucial aspects of this reduction were the elimination of paradox and contradiction in the concept; the establishment of one accepted register of what transformation was and it is becoming sector-specific or socially blind. This means that the process was narrowed down in the policy texts and in the corresponding implementation strategies to the transformation of higher education, the schools system, the judiciary and the media, without keeping an eye on the structural conditions that can influence it in one way or another.

Dr Lange said the need for accountability further helped with reduction of transformation. “Because government and social institutions are accountable for their promises, transformation had to be measured and demonstrated.”

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