Congratulations Montana on making the Australian Pearls team!
31 May 2023
2022 and 2023 have been huge for Montana. She has been working hard towards selection into the Coburg Big V Youth League Women’s team for the past three years.
In 2022 she represented Coburg in our Under 20 Women’s team who competed in the Victorian Championship competition. This year she became a member of our Youth League Women’s squad, and she has been able to earn selection and play in several games.
Away from Coburg, Montana was again selected to represent Victoria for the Ivor Burge Women’s team in both 2022 and 2023. The Ivor Burge team is selected from the most outstanding athletes with an intellectual impairment and the group represented Victoria at Nationals in Mackay in 2022 and in Geelong 2023 this past February. 2022 saw Montana co-captain Victoria and bring home a Gold Medal and, despite the format changing to 3x3 this year, Montana continued to dominate this competition and this year she added the individual accolade of Tournament MVP, an award for the player adjudged to be the most valuable player of the tournament. She was again captain and brought home the Gold for Victoria.
Since her domination of that tournament, she has also been awarded the Victorian Basketball Athlete of the Year with an Intellectual Disability.
During this time Montana was also selected for and represented Australia in the Australian Pearls team. The team won Gold in Brisbane at the Virtus Oceania Asia Games 2022 and Montana was co-captain of that team.
This week Montana left for Vichy in France to compete in the Virtus Global Games. The Virtus Global Games is the world’s largest elite sports event for athletes with an intellectual impairment. Thousands of athletes from Europe, America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania will perform across ten main sports. We know Montana will play a huge part of any of the success of the Pearls team in this tournament.
We are very proud of Montana’s achievements and very happy to support Montana in her chase for excellence. We love Monty!