Silver Ferns Great Katrina - ‘I Battled Become A Mum'

The netball star reveals the struggle she and hubby Joel faced to fulfill their dream of becoming parents

- Kelly Bertrand

It’s a thought shared by almost every first-time mum-to-be: “Jeez, there’s an awful lot they don’t tell you before you get pregnant!”

Katrina Rore is no different. The incredulous Silver Ferns star adds, “There’s something new every day – and why do they need so much stuff? Pregnancy, eh? It’s definitely a journey!”

Thirty-seven weeks along, the netball great and her builder husband Joel, 29, are now very much counting down the days until they can meet their baby girl, and Katrina says she couldn’t be more excited at becoming a mum.

However, the road to motherhood was, for her, a little tougher. Though she’d been experiencing a dream pregnancy, like so many couples, Katrina and Joel initially struggled to get pregnant.

“We decided we wanted to have kids after the 2019 Netball World Cup,” Katrina, 33, tells Woman’s Day during our photoshoot at the luxurious Naumi Studio Hotel Wellington. “And it just didn’t happen, so we ended up going to a fertility clinic to check that everything was OK.

“Both myself and Joel got tested – that was quite entertaining – and we tried to figure out what was going on.”

Katrina had already taken the first step a year or so before she and Joel began trying, by taking an AMH test, a simple blood test that tells you how many eggs you have left.

“I’d been told that my stocks were a bit low and that I should potentially look at having kids then, but I just wasn’t ready,” she recalls.

When she and Joel did begin trying, she took the test again – and to everyone’s surprise, her egg numbers came back higher than they were a year ago, which is highly unusual.