MSNBC was on in the gym just now, and they were showing the Norway-South Korea team handball match. (Now this is the kind of thing the Olympics is for – why don’t they show more of that occasionally on NBC?) It’s an awesome sport. It’s a mix of full contact basketball and hockey without ice. It’s very fast paced, has lots of contact, (but no outright tackling), and a decent amount of scoring (about 30 goals per game according to wikipedia). The game is played on a hard court with a small ball. The goals are on ground level and each team has a goalie. You can advance the ball by dribbling (like basketball), but all the defense is zone due to the large crease around the net that offensive players cannot penetrate. You can only hold the ball for three seconds and take 3 steps with it, and pivoting counts as a step. This successfully eliminates the 1-on-1 component that makes the NBA just a showcase for two people to play while 8 watch from up close. The only way you can go into the crease around the goal is if you do it in the air, which makes for a lot of jump shots and double pumping in the air. Pat Forde at ESPN even labeled it the most underrated sport in the Olympics:

Team handball (7). The Metric Dash has never understood why the sport isn’t more popular in the United States. It’s fast, creative, team-oriented and played with a ball — and nobody loves ball sports more than Americans. It has elements of basketball, hockey, lacrosse and water polo (see below). It’s a blast to play (yes, The Metric Dash has actually played it). Yet it’s such a nonentity in the U.S. that neither the American men nor the American women qualified for the Olympics. The sport’s power is concentrated in Europe.

It’s a very cool sport, and I really want to play. All I need to do is convince 13 more people….

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 10:59 am by Ari and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.