Sport “A mixture of basketball, netball and futsal”: Introduction to DU Handball

Sanjay Suri & Joe Harston Sport Editor & Deputy Sport Editor

One of the key factors that made Durham University named Sports University of the Year by The Times was the huge breadth in sport that it offers. One of those is handball — a sport popular in mainland Europe, but less well-known in the UK.

We sat down with DU Handball’s club captain Sophie Granville, men’s B team captain Tom Melling, and new player Ozzy Agyapong Beach to discuss how handball is growing at the University and across the country.

Handball is a high-scoring, fastpaced team sport where players a empt to score goals by throwing the ball into the opposition net. It is often end-to-end and never short of exciting moments.

“That’s the big thing to get used to.” Tom tells us. “A full match is an hour long and you’d expect ge ing around one goal a minute so you get many high scores and that can be a weird thing to get used to.”

He also described the sport as “fast, exciting and a sense of togetherness.” This has been something that the University team has tried to introduce to its newest members. In recent years it has developed from a team that would

“struggle to get teams for matches and train in Hild Bede without goals” to “being selective with who we want to play”. Sophie points towards an increase in the number of UK students taking up the sport.

“We started about six years ago, but the team was reliant on Erasmus students. I joined three years ago but that was the first year with a women’s team, but it has just grown and grown. Now we have enough for four teams: two men’s and two women’s and now because more English people are ge ing involved, it means the team can progress more, because people are staying for three or four years at university.”

Sophie is the first ever female club captain at DU Handball and this season marks the first time that both the men’s and women’s teams have had supplementary B teams. They have worked closely with DU Women in Sport and Team Durham to ensure that the sport gets more publicity. “My drive this year is to make the women’s team more well known. A lot of people have been messaging the account asking if it’s just men who can get involved.”

“DU Women in Sport, which started this year, has helped too. We have been tagging them a lot when we are doing women’s only stuff so that gets on there as well.”

Unfortunately, this season has been one of transition for the women’s team, but the speed of development with new players has been very encouraging viewing.

“We beat York for the first time at the end of last term and at the beginning we didn’t expect to see that much progression. We’ve got so many players this year and I didn’t expect that.”

The men’s team are currently competing in Division One, with the aim to consolidate their place in their league. However, the B team have their eyes on not only promotion, but also winning the Division Three title.

Given that this is their first ever full season, that would be an outstanding achievement. For the A team, they have the excitement of competing in the National Cup, having progressed in the first round back in November.

“We have entered the national cup for the first time, that’s not a university thing; that’s like handball’s equivalent to the FA Cup. We have the next round of that in a month so that’s exciting as well.”

This, combined with BUCS fixtures for all teams and the Summer Cup (which will feature universities from across the country) provides plenty of landmark matches over the coming months.

For the A teams, the focus is on success. However, for the B teams development is paramount. “It’s the first year we’ve had a proper B team, so that’s quite exciting which, similar to the women’s, mainly has people who haven’t played before, so it’s been about development, ge ing them used to playing the sport. We’ve been playing lots of friendlies which helps get experience.”

Players are not only a racted to the sport but to the social side of the club too.

“Because people are really enjoying it, they are staying to be part of it even if they’re not necessarily good at the sport or are still improving. That’s a racting others and people have just brought their friends in because it is a nice welcoming environment as it doesn’t ma er how well you play so long as you want to turn up and people hear about it through that.

“For handball, the skill level in the UK is a lot different to in Europe. It’s a lot more beginner friendly which has helped a lot. It means that anyone can come along and play at a competitive level which is amazing as you can bring someone along.” The a itude that the country has towards handball shows how it is helping to grow the sport from all levels.

“It’s definitely growing in England. We’ve had quite a few schools in Durham and County Durham approach us wanting us to coach them because they want us to help them start out and I know that England Handball Association are starting to push handball in schools and there are lots of clubs and it adds to the quality levels.

“As everyone gets be er that’s when it’ll start to grow as there is more reason to publicise it. At the moment no-one really knows about the national cup or the league. But, as we get be er, people will think it’s more worth their while.

“The GB men’s team has just got