Handball Is the Sports World’s Best-Kept Secret

What do you get when you mix soccer, water polo, hockey and basketball? A game that moves quickly, from one end of the court to the other, with dribbling, ball movement, high-flying leaps, tricky shots, lots of scoring and spectacular goalie saves.

Call it handball, European handball, Olympic handball or team handball.

By any name, it’s athletic, competitive, intense and exciting to watch. For millions around the world — especially Europeans — it’s fun to play and coach, too. But the game is nearly nonexistent on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

“The ‘best-kept secret in the sporting world’ is a common theme with our sport,” said Bob Djokovich, co-chairman of the board of directors of USA Team Handball (USATH), the national governing body for the sport.

USATH and its member clubs want to grow the sport across the U.S. Don’t be surprised if they succeed.

In the manner similar to soccer years ago — and still true to a lesser extent today — immigrant and ethnic enclaves make up handball’s core constituency. Over the decades, soccer’s reach extended into suburbs around the United States. Handball faces other challenges.

“I don’t think we are at a point where soccer was decades ago, as we have not been able to penetrate the younger ages as successfully as soccer … or water polo, lacrosse, etc.,” Djokovich said. “One of the reasons for the lack of success is we can’t offer scholarships, so vertical movement is limited. When USATH focused on the youth in the past, we typically lost the best athletes to other sports.”

As all sports governing bodies do, the International Handball Federation (IHF) always is looking to increase the game’s appeal. In some parts of the Americas, handball thrives as a secondary or tertiary sport, usually behind soccer or in some cases, baseball. More typically, it falls somewhere lower in the sports pecking order.

At the high end, Argentina, Brazil and Chile have the most noteworthy programs. Each country sent a national team to the IHF’s biennial men’s world championship, which took place Jan. 10-27 in Germany and Denmark. Paraguay sent a team to the 2017 women’s world championship in Germany. Uruguay often finds itself in the mix at qualifying tournaments, too.

The 2019 men’s world championship tournament took place before enthusiastic crowds, and Denmark won its first world title, at home in Herning, where a packed house of more than 15,000 fans witnessed a 31-22 triumph over Norway.

The tournament made history beyond the athletic realm, too, as Korea competed with a unified team.

Denmark also won the 2021 edition. That tournament was held in Egypt and played behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2023 world men’s handball championship is in Poland and Sweden from Jan. 11-29. It is the 28th handball world championship, which started in 1938 and is organized by the International Handball Federation. 

Here in the United States, NBC carried some of the 2019 world men’s handball championship games on its Olympic Channel. Still, only those fortunate few whose cable outlets or satellite carriers offer the Olympic Channel could see the action.

Handball lovers got their fixes with both men’s and women’s competitions at the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, and later in the year with the IHF women’s world championship in Japan. Then, of course, there were the Olympics in Tokyo.

Still, any mention of handball throughout most of the Americas — especially in the United States — will draw only blank looks. Hope for handball exists, though, as some folks have “discovered” the sport.

“[Handball] occurs every Olympic cycle, and especially in the past eight years where NBC affiliates have provided a steady stream of coverage,” Djokovich said. “The sport seems to resonate with the American public in that our website hits typically spike by 15 to 20 times whenever the sport is televised.”

Described as soccer played with the hands, water polo without water and even hockey without sticks, handball also combines elements of basketball, rugby and gridiron football.

“And I would add baseball and lacrosse to that list as well,” said Martin Bilello, youth development director for the SF CalHeat Team Handball Club, which serves a growing number of enthusiasts in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Honestly, team handball players have been historically multisport players. A multitude of skills can be adapted to a team handball player, and athletes that have several skills are usually the ones that pick it up the fastest.”