Social media allows professional sportspeople to connect with fans like never before.
Usually when a sporting team loses its star player in the off season and its first two games, chief executives get a little nervous about how many people will turn up to watch game three.
Not so Carolyn Campbell, the head of Netball NSW, which runs the NSW Swifts.
Sooner or later, after two sellout matches - resulting in two wins by the Swifts over highly fancied rivals - Campbell will face a very different problem: to risk moving to the bigger stadium (Allphones Arena, capacity 17,000) and possibly finding it half empty - or staying put at the Sydney Olympic Park Sports Centre (capacity 4000) and possibly turning fans away. It's a good problem to have.
''It has always been my vision for the NSW Swifts to have average crowds of 8,000 – 10,000 at every home game which would mean moving to a bigger venue," Campbell said. "But right now, I’m excited by the response we’re receiving from our fans and members and couldn’t be happier with the crowd figures from the first two home games.''
What have the Swifts done to maximise their crowds? Partly, the competition is very even (top side Melbourne beat bottom side Waikato by one goal on Sunday) so there are no dud games. Partly, too, it's a well-run international standard competition in the most popular female sport in the country.
The Swifts spend a "minimal" amount on radio advertising and encourage their members and associations to spread the gospel.
But partly, for mine anyway, I think the players' use of social media is having an impact on motivating fans to attend - and that's all netballers, not just the Swifts.
There was an interesting piece on smh.com.au this week about former Star Trek star George Takei's use of Twitter and Facebook. His posts are always positive and as a result has a massive following.
I notice that netballers are almost always positive in their posts; and social media allows them to connect with fans like never before.
On Twitter, Swifts fans got to empathise with Susan Pratley through her self-imposed chocolate ban; help choose a name for Kimberlee Green's puppy; and read Sonia Mkoloma's driving and shopping dilemmas. It's all lighthearted, often self-deprecating fun but it helps these athletes brand themselves as normal and down to earth - to which their fans can relate. (And Sonia, in Sydney, everyone knows to close the car window before the rain gets in.)
In last Sunday 's game in Sydney, Firebirds wing attack Chelsea Pitman fell, clutching at her knee. A few minutes later she was on the sidelines with ice on her knee and tears in her eyes. She had had a knee reconstruction before: she was well aware of how much netball she could miss and, just last year having broken into the Australian team, how many opportunities might slip by.
So she tweeted: "It is not what happens to you but how you respond to what happens to you."
Then she posted a photo of herself having a laugh in her MRI gown.
The early news for Pitman was good - no structural damage to her knee.
Sometimes it really does pay to be positive.
