1) Swedish International, Oscar Carlen, retires. Carlen, once a rising star, has had multiple knee surgeries and therefore has decided to end his career at the age of 25.

(Source: ystadsallehanda.se) (Swedish)

Summary story:  Link

Commentary by Jan Ohlsson:  “Could have been one of the world’s best players”: Link

2) Nikola Karabatic likes idea of an NBA style handball league.  He isn’t so sure, however, if the French and German leagues would like it.  Interview with El Periodical (Spanish):  Link  (Subscription required for full article)

3) Champions League qualification for Group Play is now complete.  Summary of the key matches from this past weekend at the EHF Champions League site: Link

Editor’s Note:  The Handball News Summary is a new feature that we will be experimenting with over the next couple of weeks.  The intent of the Handball News Summary will be to highlight some of the key news developments in the Handball world.  In terms of experimenting we’re not certain yet as to how frequently we will post a news summary and how significant a news event will need to be in order to make the summary.  If you would like to have an article considered for inclusion email us at editors@teamhandballnews.com

A couple of key points

1) We will always try to link and give credit to the original source of the news.  Perhaps in some instances we might not realize that another site has simply taken the material from another website and claimed it as it’s own, but we’ll do our best.

2) The news items will often be in a language other than English.  A number of websites such as Google Translate, Babelfish and Bing Translate provide workable translations.  (Of course, we could simply do an automatic translation, not even bother to clean up the garbled English and then claim the news item as our own creation, but we’ll leave that to other websites.)