When Romelda Aiken-George hung up her bib at the end of the 2025 season, the line in the press release was final: "After 18 seasons, 245 games, four premierships and three league MVPs, Romelda Aiken-George hung up her bib at the end of the 2025 Suncorp Super Netball season." Six months later, the 36-year-old Jamaican-Australian shooter is back, scoring at will for West Coast Fever, and quietly closing on a record almost no one in the modern game thought was reachable.
According to Suncorp Super Netball coverage, "Romelda Aiken-George will equal the all-time record for national league matches played, currently held by Cath Cox (254)." Cox, the former Swifts and Diamonds captain who built her 254-match tally across the ANZ Championship and the early years of Super Netball, set the benchmark in an era when retirements at 32 or 33 were the norm. To equal it at 36, in a competition that has only become more physical, requires a level of late-career durability that very few professional team-sport athletes have managed in this country.
Fox Sports framed it bluntly: "In her 250th national league match, Romelda Aiken-George continues to break new ground. She's already smashed her own goal scoring record." The numbers behind the milestone keep climbing. Across her past five outings — including last weekend's 51-goal haul against Sunshine Coast Lightning — Aiken-George has averaged better than 88% accuracy from the post and has not registered a sub-40 individual performance since Round 3.
The record itself is set to fall in Round 9, the league's Priceline Pharmacy Women's Health Round, when West Coast Fever host Adelaide Thunderbirds at RAC Arena on Friday night. Suncorp officials have confirmed that match will be Aiken-George's 254th appearance — equalling Cox — with the outright record set to fall the following round if she suits up against Giants Netball.
Netball Scoop's tribute to her 250th match captured the broader weight of what is unfolding: "One of netball's all time greats, Romelda Aiken-George, played her 250th national league game on Sunday. Record holder Cath Cox's tally of 254" was, the publication wrote, no longer a question of whether but when.
For West Coast Fever, the timing could not be better. The franchise is sitting fourth on the ladder, well-placed for finals, and has built much of its 2026 attacking shape around the certainty Aiken-George provides inside the goal circle. For Australian netball, it is the rare chance to celebrate a still-active player rewriting the longevity benchmark in real time — a story the league knows it has to amplify in a competition where superstar narratives have not always cut through.