Bathurst will join teams from Baulkham Hills, Hastings Valley, Inner Western Suburbs, Lismore, Newcastle, Northern Suburbs, Queanbeyan and Sutherland Shire in a battle to decide the state’s best open association outfit.

The competition will be stiff, so Germech is not placing any expectations on his players.

“We are not really sure about what the standard will be like. Our approach is we are just going to treat it as a bit of a celebration of what has for us been a pretty successful year,” he said.

“We know a number of the teams we are going to be up against have come from div one at the state championships, so we are looking forward to that as an insight of what we will see next year at state championship as we are going to division one then.

“The team is all enthusiastic about playing and keen to do well, but certainly we don’t have any sheep stations riding on it.

“If we lose by 10 or 20 goals we will still walk off the court smiling. We’ve talked about that if we are getting beaten, we will just try harder and harder. If we win some, we win some.

“Because it is new ground for us we genuinely don’t have any expectations. We are looking forward to playing some good teams, playing some good netball and doing as well as we can.”

The tournament is also a chance for two of Bathurst’s under 17s talents, Teagan Germech and Amy Belfanti, to step up.

They join eight members of the squad which beat Orange and went undefeated through 18 games in division two at the June state titles.

Germech said no matter this weekend’s results, 2017 has been a huge success.

“When you look back over the season – [winning the] HeartKids Cup, Regional League, state champs – we certainly weren’t expecting that level of success back in January,” he said.

“We didn’t expect our season to go this long, we didn’t even know about State Cup until after we won regionals.”