Where’s the USA Team Handball fan? (Hint: There’s one in Southern Nevada)

In Part 4, I pointed out that one factor limiting sponsor funding was the reality that there are very few followers of Team Handball in the U.S. In Part 5 I try to explain why there are so few and why this is such a big reason for the sports lack of success.   (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Well, pretty much every American who’s ever been involved with the sport knows that it’s a little known sport in this country, but how “little known” is it.  Over the years I’ve addressed this from a number of different angles.  For the benefit of new readers, however, I’ll rehash the basic issues.  First, though, I’ll try to quantify the problem a bit.

Just how lacking is this “lack of awareness?”

Despite some positive inroads and gains over the 25 years or so that I’ve followed the sport, the reality is that the footprint for Team Handball in the U.S. is extremely small.  How extremely small?  Well, without the benefit of a sophisticated survey it’s pretty tough to definitively qualify the sport’s popularity and awareness quotient.  Lacking that survey, I’ve put together some numbers based on personal experience, informed speculation and extrapolation.

Basic Awareness

I’ll define basic awareness as anyone who when asked could give a short simple explanation of the sport.  I suspect that if a poll were taken you would get probably around 5% of Americans to pass that basic test.  This may seem overly pessimistic to some American Team Handball followers because they’ve preached the gospel to virtually every friend and acquaintance in their life.  And as a sports fan you’re also likely hanging out with fellow sports fans who are more likely to pass the basic awareness test.  For instance, if you were to conduct a survey at a sports bar you could probably get a 25% response.  Ask the right expat community in New York, you might get 75%.  But, at a random chruch or a concert hall, you might be lucky to get 1 in a 100.  The timing of such a survey would also skew the results.  With the Olympics still fresh in more people’s minds, you could maybe bump up the average to 10% or more, but as the Olympics fades into memory the casual fan might forget the few minutes that he perused a couple of years ago while flipping through the channels on his TV.

A necessary diatribe on semantics

There are a number of reasons behind this low awareness quotient, but one of the biggest reasons is the existence of another, unrelated sport sharing the same name, “Handball.”  For the benefit of our readers, not living in the U.S, Canada, Ireland and Australia, this other Handball sport can best be described as “racquetball with your hands.”   And without question this “Handball” is more well known and popular in these countries.  While it’s easy to dismiss this as a minor semantics issue it has undoubtedly hurt the development and marketing of the sport in the U.S.  On a basic level it creates a remarkable amount of confusion and always requires a short diatribe to explain the sport.

In a broader context it hampers the “branding” of the sport in the consciousness of Americans.  If you consider that companies often spend millions of dollars figuring out what to name a product in the hopes that consumers will remember that product you get a sense that this little semantic problem is really a big one with no simple solution.

Well, theoretically there is a simple solution in that an entirely new name could be christened for the sport.  And this has been done halfway in the U.S. with the addition of the “Team” in Team Handball.  Unfortunately, this only half solved the problem as the name still causes more confusion then distinction.  And other names have been used.  In some parts of Canada the sport is referred to as E.T.H. European Team Handball as a further modifier and in Ireland it’s referred to as Olympic Handball.  I like the Irish name for it immediate conjures up the Olympic Games, but I’m not so sure as to whether the protective USOC would allow the use of the Olympic name.  A more radical solution would be to come up with an entirely new name like Goalball, but then that would create a whole host of new problems like the marketing that would be required.  Not to mention the resistance that would surely follow from traditionalists that can stand even the “Team” modifier.

If your sport isn’t on TV it doesn’t matter

Aside from the semantics problems there are a number of other issues related to so few people even knowing the sport exists.  As was touched upon previously, the dominance of basketball in the U.S. has made it tougher for a similar indoor sport to gain traction.  There is also a tremendous dearth when it comes to stories in the press, which is why it’s always a cause for minor celebration in the USA Team Handball community when some reporter writes a nice story on the sport in a major newspaper.  Without question, though, the lack of TV broadcasts is the biggest reason behind the sports low awareness quotient.

During the 2008 and 2012 Olympics I’ve seen the impact of TV first hand as the traffic to our website increases by leaps and bounds.  Here’s one anecdote for you.  During the MSNBC broadcast of a women’s match between Sweden and Denmark on the first day of the Olympics I watched our current unique visitors jump from 20 to 370 in the space of 15 minutes.  So that means that roughly 350 Americans sitting on their couch grabbed their iPad or their laptop and typed “Team Handball” into Google and clicked on the link for Team Handball News.  And those are just the individuals with that level of curiosity.  Thousands more undoubtedly checked out other websites or simply watched this “new” sport for the first time.  And this is on MSNBC, a network that normally shows news that is temporarily hijacked during the Olympics every four years.   We could argue about whether the basic awareness of the sport is 2%, 5% or 8%, but I don’t think anyone would argue that broadcasts like this caused this number to jump significant amounts

1 in a million:  The need for real fans and real awareness

But, increasing “basic awareness” is just the first battle to be fought.  If the sport is to truly grow and develop in this country the sport needs more real fans.  And this is where the title of this article comes into play.  The number of really devoted fans and athletes of the sport in the U.S. is an incredibly small number.   There are a few metrics and anecdotes that bear this out pretty starkly:  USA Team Handball membership has hovered around the 300-500 mark for decades.  The collegiate championship for several years has featured only 3 or 4 schools.   (And often West Point accounts for 2 of the teams.)  Tryouts/selections for national teams, particularly at younger levels sometimes involves simply finding any players.  Club championships in recent years have become more and more an Expat convention with native born Americans in the minority.

All of these anecdotes lead to my conclusion, that in the U.S. there are maybe around 300 real fans of the sport.  Somebody, who when asked, “Hey, what’s your favorite sport?” without hesitation replies Team Handball.  As the U.S. population is moving in on the 312 million mark, I’ll put the number at 312, so the devoted few can proudly claim they are 1 in a million.

The impact of this stark reality hardly needs explanation.  How can the U.S. expect to field quality teams with such a small talent pool to work with?  How can the U.S. attract big sponsorship deals when such a deal results in minimal exposure?  As I’ve pointed out in this series the U.S. has a lot of challenges, but this lack of awareness is probably as close as there is to a root problem.  If this problem is fixed then more funding and finding/developing better players will become far more easier.  Yes, step one is changing 1 in 1,000,000 to 1 in a 100,000 and then 1 in 10,000.

So that quantifies the extent of the problem in terms of awareness.  And, of course, it begs the question, why isn’t more being done to fix it.  In Part 6, I’ll further address the struggle and challenges involved with with getting the sport on TV more.

If only it were so easy to get substantial funding from these sources.

In part 3, I provided an overview of USA Team Handball’s funding since 1993 and some background as to why the USOC has decreased funding since the 96 Olympics.  Continuing with the theme of funding sources, in this part I look at why the sport hasn’t received much in terms of funding from sponsors and donors.   (Links to Part 1, Part 2)

Sponsors:  As the concept of a “sponsor” might mean different things to different people, I’ll define it as any company that contributes funding to USA Team Handball for the promotion of their product.  (Note:  This is significantly different from the concept of a donor (discussed later) for which there is nothing expected in kind.)

Companies with Handball Specific Products:  There are a number of products that are directly related to the sport of Team Handball.  The obvious products include balls, goals, nets, flooring, shoes and stickum.  Companies with make these products have an incentive to sponsor USA Team Handball since the use and promotion of these products by the Federation is pretty much guaranteed to reach almost everyone in the U.S. that would consider buying these products.  Over the years, USA Team Handball had had a number of sponsorship agreements with companies that make these products, but I don’t have access to the documentation which shows how substantial these agreements were.  In recent years, USA Team Handball did score a $50,000 sponsorship deal with SnapSports (a maker of floor courts), but I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if in most instances the primary benefit was simply equipment being provided for national team use.  (Side note:  Another item, worthy of a lengthy discussion are TV rights and that will be covered in the next installment.)

So, first the good news:  USA Team Handball can pitch to these potential advertisers its phenomenal market reach.  Seriously, if you advertise on USA Team Handball’s webpage, you are probably going to reach nearly 100% of the U.S. Handball market.  But, now the bad news:  The number behind that 100% is probably in the neighborhood of around 500 people.  If these companies do the math, and they generally have people that really do the math (if they want to stay in business), this means that the dollar figures behind these sponsorships isn’t going to currently amount to much.

Companies with Sports Related Products:  There are a number of sports related products not specific to Team Handball that also might find merit with a sponsorship relationship with USA Team Handball.  The most obvious item is team uniforms, but other items such as protective undergarments could come into play.  These sponsors, however, are also pretty aware of the relatively few numbers they will reach through USA Team Handball.  USA Team Handball has generally been pretty successful in finding a uniform sponsor, although it’s not clear how much funding these deals brought in.  If the U.S. could find more success on the court and qualify for the World Championships and convince a U.S. network to air a few national team matches the uniform contract would certainly increase in value.

Companies with Generic Products:  There’s nothing to prevent Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, or some other random company from joining the USA Team Handball sponsorship family.  Well, nothing other than the same argument:  They’d be paying to reach only a few potential customers.  Still, despite this USA Team Handball has had some success in this area in the past.   If companies with Team Handball specific products have taken a pass on advertising with USA Team Handball, you might wonder why on Earth some other random company would give it a go?

The answer generally falls into a couple of categories.  First, some companies want to get aligned with the Olympic movement in any way possible and USA Team Handball can provide an entrée for doing so.  The most striking example was a substantial sponsorship (reportedly around $1M) from the Weather Channel during the 96 Olympics timeframe.  I don’t the full specifics of how this came to pass, but I suspect that the Weather Channel, based in Atlanta, wanted to join the Olympic family and was either coaxed or steered in USA Team Handball’s direction.   I’ll never forget the bizarre juxtaposition of seeing USA Team Handball promotional ads being aired in between weather forecasts and contemplating just how many people watching even knew what they were seeing.  Unfortunately, enticing these companies usually requires being in the Olympics which has proven problematic in recent years.

The second category generally requires someone in the company having an affinity to Team Handball.  How else to explain USA Team Handball’s current sponsorship from Grundfos, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of water pumps?  This Danish company clearly has an affinity to the sport because the likelihood of a USA Team Handball follower also having a need of a water pump is probably pretty small.  In many respects, the distinction between this sort of sponsor and a straight up donor is pretty negligible.

Donors:  If a sponsor provides money with the intent of promoting their product, a donor is someone or some company providing money with no real expectation of profit or promotion.  Donors support a charity, a movement, or a sports federation because they believe in the cause.   I don’t know how much money has been donated over the years, but I suspect that with the exception of Dieter Esch’s fairly recent generosity it hasn’t amounted to a whole lot.

Much like a presidential campaign there’s two ways to accumulate significant funding from donations.  You can either get a few people to contribute a lot or you can get a lot of people to contribute a little.

The millionaire donor:  During the Olympics, sports columnist Jack McCallum whimsically suggested that some altruistic millionaire should take it upon himself to fund USA Team Handball.

Not the first time somebody has come up with that idea as it is the simple solution to the big funding problem.  It seems somewhat silly, but it is at least conceivable.  After all, a lot of millionaires have purchased sports franchises and then bought players to win regardless of how much it costs their bottom line. The team becomes essentially a toy for them in the big scheme of things.  And even outside of professional sports, Paul Allen of Microsoft fame and T Boone Pickens have respectively, turned the Oregon and Oklahoma State NCAA Football teams into top programs.

From that perspective why not spend money turning around an Olympic sport?  The funny thing is, is this is sort of what happened to USA Team Handball on a smaller scale when Dieter Esch bankrolled the Federation from 2008-2010.  I say, “sort of” because Mr. Esch’s generosity had its limits, somewhere perhaps between $500K and $1M.  While his generosity was substantial, we would need Mark Cuban dollars for a full and complete turnaround.  And while I wouldn’t count on this happening, if there ever is someone with idle cash and a love for the sport, I sure hope USA Team Handball is ready to pounce with a pitch that will close the deal.

In the mean time, USA Team Handball could still make inroads with more donors being willing to contribute substantial, but still sizable donations.  Indeed this was the strategy behind the $50K cost for a Board of Director’s seat that Mr. Esch implemented.  And this was how Grundfos was brought into the fold.  Problem is, though, that more companies and businesses did not follow suit.  This could have been a salesmanship problem, but perhaps it’s more of a product problem.

Salesmanship Problem or a Product Problem?

One of the things that I’ve found amusing in online forums or in postgame discussions at the bar are critical comments directed at USA Team Handball for not raising more funds and/or being content to live off the USOC.  As if incompetence and laziness were the only things keeping us from going out in to the backyard to pick corporate checks off the fundraising tree.

I don’t have full insight into how much effort USA Team Handball put into fundraising over the years, but it clearly appears to have been a priority of the last GM and Board President.  Unfortunately, while they made good progress in establishing relationships with several European entities significant funding streams didn’t materialize.  Maybe they were simply bad salesmen, but I would assess their lack of success more to the bitter truth that there is little present value with the product of USA Team Handball.

It’s true that there are some incredible salesmen that can seemingly sale anything to anyone.   But in the midst of a struggling world economy even the Billy Mays of the world are going to come up short if the product doesn’t cut it.

So, given this currently reality how can we convince potential donors and sponsors to step forward and provide more funding to USA Team Handball?  Two answers:

1) Sell the future.  While the present value of USA Team Handball is paltry, the potential future value is exceedingly bright.  A nation of 308 Million people and only around 500 dedicated followers?  A sport tailor made for Americans?  For a long time sponsors and donors couldn’t see that potential future or thought it was a pipedream, but a number of developments have occurred in recent years to start turning some heads.  (To be discussed in the next installment)

In order to sell that future, however, USA Team Handball is going to have to convince the sponsors, donor and international partners that a clear plan is in place to make that future happen.

2) Improve the current product.  Of course, this is obvious, but it’s important to note that is not necessarily fully aligned with National Team performance.  No, the goal here is to improve the product from the viewpoint of potential sponsors and donors.  This means a number of things, but more than anything it means turning 500 dedicated followers into 5,000 and then 50,000 and then more.

So that wraps up the discussion on sponsor and donors.  In part 5, I further elaborate on some of the reasons the sport of handball is so little known in the U.S.  

Since the 96 Olympics the bottom line for USA Team Handball has been trending down.

In Part 1, I provided some top level analysis as to why our current national teams didn’t qualify for the London Olympics- we’re simply not very good.  In Part 2, I addressed the challenges USA Team Handball has had in finding and developing athletes.  In Part 3, I tackle the current lack of funding, some potential sources of additional revenue and why the U.S. has struggled to raise more funds.

It doesn’t take long for anyone observing the state of Team Handball in the U.S. to come up with a number of potential solutions as to how things could be turned around.  Very few of those solutions, however, come free and even the lowest cost options require some level of funding to implement.  It can be amusing to hear or read these would be solutions and then do some back of the envelope cost analysis to quickly determine that  the first year of implementation alone would bust the entire U.S. budget for the last decade.

Just how lacking is this “Lack of Funding?”

So, just how cash strapped is USA Team Handball?  I don’t have all the financial details, but the U.S. Government’s tax reporting requirements do provide a pretty good window of the trend that have occurred in the past two decades.  Using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990s that are available through different online resources, I was able to do some forensic analysis.   For each year, the first number is the amount listed on USA Team Handball’s Form 990s in regards to “gifts, grants and contributions received.”  The second number is the contribution amount listed in U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) Form 990s as being granted to USATH.

Year       Total Contributions         USOC Grant
1993       $841,615
1994       $1,396,152
1995       $1,204,365
1996       $1,383,813
1997       $867,116
1998       $585,000
1999       $563,152
2000       $741,322
2001       $652,364              $510,000
2002       $614,930              $379,000
2003       $547,091              $487,561
2004       $458,621              $354,237
2005       <<N/A>>             $281,620
2006       <<N/A>>             $3,184
2007       <<N/A>>             $500
2008       $489,150              $0
2009       $974,612              $238,268
2010       <<N/A>>             $335,552
2011       <<N/A>>              $283,202

First, a few notes regarding the data above:

– I couldn’t find USOC Form 990s prior to the year 2000.
– From 2006-2008 there was essentially no USA Team Handball Federation due to the USOC’s decertification of the Federation.  During that time period, however, the USOC took over many of the responsibilities of the Federation.  It would be interesting to see what it cost the USOC to run Team Handball during that period, but those numbers aren’t available.
– The USOC fiscal year is the same as the Calendar year while USA Team Handball’s Fiscal Year is from 1 July to 30 June.  In other words 2009 data is actually from 1 July 2009 to 30 June 2010.
– Reportedly, there was a number of accounting problems with USA Team Handball’s 2010 Form 990 and I think that is why it hasn’t been filed yet.
– There are several other items that I could have listed in the table to include total revenue and total expenses.  With few exceptions, however, total revenue and expenses track very closely to the total contribution number.  In other words, almost all of USA Team Handball’s revenue has been in the form of grants and USA Team Handball expenses have matched that revenue.  (Although, based on reports of debt problems this is probably not true for the 2010-2011 timeframe.)
– The Form 990 does not require the filing organization to fully break out where the contributions come from and for what amount.  This is why I include the USOC reporting of grants to Team Handball.  Additionally, it appears that older versions of the form don’t clearly delineate between grant and sponsorship funding.

While there are a lot of limitations with this data, it does provide a pretty good indication of the downward trend in funding.  Certainly from the high water mark (around the 96 Olympics) to the demise of the Federation in 2006 there’s a significant drop in funding.  And not surprisingly, there was a corresponding drop in performance on the court with the U.S. not coming anywhere close to qualifying for the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.  Aside from the drop in national team performance the lack of funding undoubtedly exacerbated USA Team Handball’s management/leadership problems leading to the Federation’s eventual decertification by the USOC.

With the establishment of the new Federation in 2008 there was an uptick in funding, but this uptick was mostly attributable to the generosity of Dieter Esch.  USOC funding from 2009 to 2011 has ranged from $238K to $335K, still far below reported figures from 2000-2004 and surely below grants provided during the 1996 Olympics timeframe.  With Dieter Esch deciding to turn off the spigot in 2010, USA Team Handball is reportedly back to a budget in the $300-500K range.

It can be debated as to just how much USA Team Handball needs in terms of funding to field competitive teams, but few would argue that $300-500K is sufficient.  Certainly, if $1.3M budgets were required in the 1996 timeframe to be “respectable” in Atlanta, then probably at least that much (adjusted for inflation) is needed today.  And not to mention, there’s a whole lot more than just national team budgets to consider.  How do you also pay for development and the interests of the membership at large.  And marketing, staff salaries, etc, etc.  Really, to do things right you probably need more like $5M.

So, Where’s the “Mo Money” Going to Come from?

So, if it’s so obvious you need more money, why you just craft a plan and go get it.  Right?  If only, it was so easy.  On the plus side, it is fairly obvious what the potential sources of additional revenue are, it’s just that convincing those sources to actually cough up the bucks is easier said than done.  What follows is a list of the potential sources, why they haven’t contributed as much as maybe they should and some top level assessment as to what it’s going to take for them to change their minds.

USOC:  For decades the USOC has been the main funding source for USA Team Handball.  This funding has varied over the years at times probably pushing the $1M mark at the high end and bottoming out to zero at the low end.  (It would be interesting to see more definitive financial data going back to the 1970s and adjusted for inflation, but that information is not readily available.)   In more recent years it has been around $300K.  So what happened?   Why the dramatic decrease in funding support?

The simple answer is that since the 96 Olympics the USOC has increasingly decided to base their funding decisions on what a sport’s chances for getting a medal are.  With the U.S. not being coming close to a medal in 96 and clearly no chance of medalling on the horizon it’s easy to see how Team Handball is going to come up short when competing against the likes of Swimming and Gymnastices.  Even worse as a team sport the costs of fielding a competitive team are pretty substantial and the return on investment can only be one medal in each gender.  The bitter reality is that no matter how you slice and dice it, if you’re trying to maximize medals for the least cost, investing in Team Handball is a fool’s errand.

Might the USOC, however, rethink its current medal emphasis?  I can think of a number of other factors that should be considered when the USOC makes these decisions.  Those factors include Federation need, potential TV audience and health/fitness for the nation as a whole.  In each of those areas USA Team Handball scores pretty high.  “Need” certainly doesn’t need to be explained.  As witnessed by the buzz from the recent Olympics it should be even clearer to USOC reps that the sport is tailor made for TV.  I’m obviously biased, but I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that the dynamics of attractive Team Handball match is inherently more entertaining than watching an arrow hit a target or boat crews rowing their oars back and forth.  Finally, with obesity becoming an increasing health concern the prospect of thousands of youths running up and down the court is a selling point that the USOC will/should at least listen to.

While these are factors that the USOC appears to consider, the goal is still clearly gold, silver or bronze.  And as long as that’s the case the best USA Team Handball can probably hope for is probably around $500K/year, an amount which is more in line with the funding levels of some of the other minor Olympic sports.

But the USOC isn’t the only game in town, in Part 4 I’ll review why funding has also been lacking from international entities, sponsors and other sources of potential revenue.

Targeted recruiting for national teams or grass roots development? Or Both? And why is it so hard?

In Part 1, I provided some top level analysis as to why our current national teams didn’t qualify for the London Olympics.   This analysis simply looked at our current team and compared that team to former U.S. Olympic teams and our current Pan American competition.  That analysis highlighted that our current teams are lacking in the following areas: 1) Raw athletic talent, 2) Conditioning, 3) Individual technique/skills, 4) Team cohesion/experience, 5) Coaching strategy/preparation.  In this second part I start to look at the underlying reasons for failure.

The Underlying Reasons:   A complicated web they weave.

I’ve been asked a number of times over the years, just why the U.S. isn’t any good in Team Handball.  I usually reply with “How much time do you have and where should I start?”  As I started to map out the reasons on paper in a systematic way it became even more clear to me just how complicated it is as all of the reasons are interlocking in multiple ways so there is no clear root cause to failure.  In short, there is no straight line cause and effect like the old “For want of a nail” proverb by which if we just solve this one thing we’ll become a great handball nation.  Perhaps, some reasons like the lack of funding or lack of marketing exposure come close, but there is no “silver bullet” guaranteed to solve all the problems.

So, with that little diatribe in mind I would like to highlight 4 major underlying reasons worth further discussion.  Those 4 reasons are:

1) A lack of good handball athletes
2) A lack of marketing/awareness
3) A lack of funding
4) Ineffective leadership/management

Underlying Reason #1:  A lack of good handball athletes

Perhaps the most obvious shortcoming to the U.S. National teams relates to a distinct lack of athlete with both the raw talent and technical skills to compete at higher levels.  There are two basic solutions or paths to address this problem:

1) Targeted Recruitment: You can recruit some good raw athletic talent and have a dedicated and intensive training program to build up their technical skills
2) Grass Roots:  You can develop broad based grass roots programs to increase the number of players in this country and out of those greater numbers some good athletes with strong technical skills will emerge.

Over the years the U.S. has tried both approaches to varying degrees of success.  In a series of articles I wrote 3 years ago, “A Framework for Creating USA National Team Success” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, I provided an in depth review of some of the problems with each strategy and proposed a hybrid model for implementation.  Here is a somewhat shortened version of that analysis.

Targeted Recruitment:  The obvious solution?

With the Olympics going on various media observers have been watching the Handball matches and have been zeroing in on the Target Recruitment strategy.  All we need is NBA D-League players or mediocre NCAA talent from the Big Sky conference and train them up a little.  Even USA Team Handball is in the act taking the more modest approach of 1 (all we need is just 1) athlete from each NCAA conference.

It’s easy to see why so many people immediately come up with this strategy as one only has to watch the teams currently playing in London and assess that there are indeed thousands, if not tens of thousands of athletes in the U.S. with the raw athletic talent necessary to compete.  But, it’s just not that simple as there are a number of further underlying reasons:

1) Recruitment of the great raw talent athlete is only feasible when those athletes run out of other options:  Many observers fully realize this and that is why the more credible back of the napkin analysis focuses on athletes that aren’t going to make the big time.  Problem is you need to convince those athletes that they aren’t going to be the next D-Leaguer that isn’t going to make the NBA.

2) More athletes have more “other” options:  Not too many years ago the options for former NCAA athletes were pretty limited making an Olympic handball career an interesting possibility.  This is not as true anymore, particularly for basketball athletes who have a lot more options in Europe.  This article highlights how things have change over the years.

3) Older players are more likely to have “life issues” emerge:  Most great raw talent athletes at least having the option of playing their chosen sport in college.  This means the youngest athletes will be in 22-23 age range.  Certainly from a physicality standpoint this age is not a tremendous problem, but with each passing year athletes will inevitably have “life issues” play a greater and greater role in their overall psyche.  The possibility of marriage, needing to start a career or just waking up some morning and deciding that this training isn’t any fun anymore will come into play.

4) The Olympic carrot is less of a tangible reward:  In the past a USA Team Handball recruiter could confidently wave the Olympic carrot in front of a would be player.  Certainly at the 84 and 96 Olympics there was automatic qualification.  The competition in the Pan American region, however, is now much stiffer and some athletes will be less enticed when they realize that participating in the Olympics is far from a guarantee.

5) Lack of funding:  And right now the USA Federation has nowhere near the funding necessary to establish a credible training program for these would be recruits.  The programs in the 80s and 90s provided room and board, overseas travel opportunities and a small stipend.  With the other reasons outlined above even that model might not be sufficient enough to recruit the players needed.

Grass Roots:  Too hard and it takes too long?

While it’s not the solution du jour, Grass Roots strategies have garnered more weight at other times.  All we have to do is copy what soccer has done (or lacrosse, or rugby, or ultimate Frisbee) and then the sport will be popular in this country.  It’s not so simple and in this post I explained why.

Perhaps the biggest proponents to this strategy are the many expats who remember how they learned the sport at younger ages in their home country.  If we could do it in Elbonia then we can do it in the USA.   Grass Roots takes time, but it’s clearly the way to go if we want to have sustained success.  If you have thousands and thousands playing the sport, you will have great players that bubble up to the top and they will be doing so at age 18, not age 25.  But it’s not easy to develop these broad based programs.  Here are some of the reasons why.

1) Starting up a team sport from scratch isn’t easy:  Team Handball is a team game and you need a lot of players in order to have a good training environment.  We can probably quibble about just exactly how many are needed, but at least 10 is probably a good number.   Then, of course, you have to add the challenge of convincing people who’ve never played a sport before to suddenly decide to devote time and money to it.  The internet and Olympic telecast make such recruiting easier, but as anybody who’s ever started a club knows this is painstaking, unglamorous work.

2) Gym space is needed:  Finding a gym to play in can be a challenge as many in the U.S. were built for smaller basketball courts.  And then all those basketball leagues have to be contended with.  The cost of gym rental can be a crippling blow to new clubs which lack the numbers to share the costs.

3) The tyranny of distance:  The U.S. is a big country.  Even if a good club program is started in one particular city, that club often has to travel considerable distance to play another club.  This means that for real grass roots efforts to succeed that one club in a city often isn’t enough.  This is why to a certain extent that there is a little bit more concentration and development on the East Coast where the population has a bit more density.

4) The dominance of basketball: Team Handball is its own game and has similarities with a number of sports.  Still, it should be obvious that there is a great deal of similarity between the two games.  Not every good basketball player could be a good team handball player (and vice-versa), but there is a massive number of players that could choose either.  Basketball was invented in the U.S. and it’s our national indoor sport.  That’s not going to ever change and those would be athletes at younger ages are almost always going to select hoops over handball.

5) The physicality of team handball:  Team Handball can be a rough sport to play and it’s probably better suited for athletes in their teens.  Accordingly, it’s at a handicap compared to other sports like soccer where there is less injury, or at least the perception of less injury.

6) The pressure to succeed now: It’s a given that Grass Roots programs will not lead to immediate success.  In fact, you could argue that it will take at least 10 years to see any success translated to our national teams.  Meanwhile the USOC, a primary funding source for USA Team Handball, requests a yearly High Performance Plan which is supposed to outline how Team USA is going to win medals when the reality is that even qualifying at this point would be a tremendous success.  This pressure has always existed, so it’s not surprising that funding choices have often been made towards supporting National Teams rather than Grass Roots efforts.  And then when those National Teams have only moderate success (if even that) the Grass Roots proponents out in the sticks have complained, if only you had given me the resources I need, I would have developed several athletes that could make your national teams.

7) Lack of funding:  But, again the reality is that even if USA Team Handball zeroed out all funding for USA National Teams there still wouldn’t be enough seed money to support Grass Roots programs on the scale that is necessary.  Sure, it could be argued that these programs should be self-sufficient, but with the challenges outlined above assistance is needed to better enable success.

The Answer?

When you start to add up the underlying reasons it becomes fairly clear that both strategies have a lot of hurdles standing in the way of success.   As I noted in my framework series there are elements of both models that have merits, so that’s why I think some sort of a hybrid approach stand the best chance of success.  And I say best chance, because there are some other underlying reasons that would have to be resolved before any plan to field better teams has a good chance at success.  Those other areas include a lack of funding, a lack of exposure/marketing,  and yes, a history of ineffective leadership/managemen.  In Part 3, I first address the historical lack of funding.

Brazil scoring one of their 50 goals in their 50-10 victory over the USA last year at the PANAM Games. The USA will need to get a lot better if it wants to qualify for the Olympics.

I’m in the process of updating the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page and as this is easily the question of the moment, I thought it worthwhile to answer it.   In this first part, I simply review the qualification competition and analyze why the U.S. came up short.

Why aren’t the USA men’s and women’s national teams at the 2012 Olympics?

The simple answer:  They didn’t qualify (and they didn’t even come close).  There are two paths to qualification for the USA; either via the World Championships or the PANAM Games.  It’s a somewhat complicated process and the details are at these links (Men’s 2012 Qualification, Women’s 2012 Qualification).  By far, the simplest and easiest way for the USA to have qualified would have been to win the Handball Tournament at the PANAM Games.

At the 2011 PANAM Games the women finished 8th out of 8 teams, failing to win a single match.  In pool play they lost to the eventual winner and Olympic qualifier, Brazil by a score of 50-10.  There’s no way to sugar coat such a loss as it means that Brazil basically scored at will.  In their other 4 games the women were more competitive, but still lost by an average of 7 goals. (Details on PANAM Games Women’s Tournament)

The men fared slightly better and finished 7th out of 8 teams.  In pool play they lost 36-19 to the eventual winner and Olympic qualifier, Argentina.  Their other pool play and placement matches were relatively close.  They lost by 5 goals to eventual 4th place finisher, the Dominican Republic and lost by 1 goal to both Mexico and Canada.  In the 7th place game they managed to beat winless Venezuela by 4.    These margins of defeat make it abundantly clear that there was no realistic scenario by which either the men or women could have qualified for London. (Details on PANAM Games Men’s Tournament)

Why weren’t the U.S. teams more competitive? The U.S. has never been a world power, but in the 80s and 90s, the U.S. fielded competitive sides that were able to earn qualification to the Olympics.   What happened?  Why the lopsided scores?  As this is just the first of two parts, I’ll first give the direct causes of failure.  In thinking about how to best capture this I came up with 5 key areas that factor into how good a team is.  These 5 key factors are:

1) Raw athletic talent
2) Conditioning
3) Individual technique/skills
4) Team cohesion/experience
5) Coaching strategy/preparation

So here’s my assessment of our current national teams and where they stand, both in comparison to their current competition and USA teams of the 80s and 90s.  (Side Note: If this assessment comes across as a cranky old timer who thinks former USA teams walked on water, let me be clear on a couple of things.  I, personally was a border line national team player on a team that only was able to eke out a win and a draw in my 12 International Game; And those were against Canada.  Translation:  I am a has been, that never was.  Going further, no USA team has ever been good enough to beat the top teams of Europe in World Championship or Olympic competition.

1) Raw athletic talent.  If you can jump higher, throw harder and move quicker than your opponent you will have a distinct advantage.   For many years, U.S. teams compensated for their lack of technical skill with superior athletic talent drawn from our sizable population

USA Women:  With the Women’s team, I would assess that only one player (Jennifer Fithian) to have the type of raw talent that would compare with our former Olympic teams.  Karoline Borg comes close and would “have a chance” to make the roster, but mostly based on her strong technical skill.  Against current PATHF competition they are totally outgunned by Brazil.  The gap with the rest of PATHF, however, isn’t as bad, but they still are at a disadvantage.

USA Men:  The men’s team is a bit stronger in this department.  Clearly backcourts Gary Hines and Adam El Zogby have the raw talent.  (Although, Hines would have to play wing instead of back.)  From what I’ve seen Jordan Fithian may have the raw talent, but it’s not as clear cut.  The rest of the roster is filled with some decent talent, but in a competitive environment for roster slots comparable to the 80s and 90s most would come up short.  Against their current competition in PATHF, however, they only have a slight handicap against Argentina/Brazil and have better raw talent than the other also-rans.

2) Conditioning.  Team Handball is a physically demanding game and if athletes are out of shape it can make a big difference.   Former USA Olympic team might have come up short technically, but rarely were they out hustled.

USA Women:  The U.S. Women’s team was clearly lacking in this area and this certainly played a role in the final score line of their matches.

USA Men:  The USA Men seemed to be OK in this department.  Although, perhaps a little better conditioning could have helped the team to overcome some rough patches in close matches.

3) Individual technique/skills: While Team Handball is a relatively easy game to learn, it can be a challenging game to master.  Despite extensive full time training (often for several years) former USA Olympic teams were always outmatched in this area by European teams.  In the 80s and 90s it was a rare occurrence for a USA team to be technically outmatched by their PATHF competition, but several PATHF nations have since made significant gains in training and development.

USA Women:  On the women’s side, arguably only one player, leading scorer and Swedish-American, Karoline Borg, has fully mastered the finer points of the game.  Several other players have made significant progress, but still have a ways to go in this department.  The current USA team is technically weaker than our former Olympic teams, but this is due to substantially fewer training opportunities.  And slippage against PATHF competition is also attributable to improved training in development in those nations.

USA Men:  Several players, primarily dual citizen athletes, are pretty sound technically.  Gary Hines is arguably the most technically developed American player that didn’t also have the benefit of training as part of a fully established USA residence program.   The American born players aren’t as strong technically for the same reasons mentioned in the women’s section.

4) Team cohesion/experience.   Team Handball, as the name indicates, is a “team” game.  How the different individual players combine their talents to form a cohesive team can make all the difference.  Additionally, teams that have played together for years have a distinct advantage in that the players are familiar with each other’s moves, strengths and weaknesses.  Former USA Olympic teams were very cohesive in that they trained and, in many instances, lived together for several years.  USA teams in the past also had the advantage of periodic overseas trips for competition.

USA Women:  The core of the USA Women’s team is a pretty cohesive unit having trained together at Cortland University from 2004-2007.  Since 2007, however, there have only been a few training camps prior to competition for World Championship or Olympic qualification.  There is no comparison to the advantages that former USA teams had in this area.  Additionally, several PATHF programs now have regular training and overseas trips for competition.

USA Men:  The Men’s team is even more handicapped in this department as players often met each other for the first time at the short training camps prior to competition.  The team has done as good as job as can be expected in this department, but they are clearly lacking opportunities to play together as a team.  This has put them at a distinct disadvantage against several PATHF foes where those teams have played dozens of games together.

5) Coaching Strategy/Preparation.  A good coach can make any team a little bit better with good X’s and O’s strategy during the match and by preparing his team with a good scouting report on the opposition.  USA Olympic teams in the past had full time coaches and in most instances they were experienced European coaches with good track records.

USA Women/USA Men:  Both the current men’s and women’s teams do not have permanent head coaches.  Instead coaches have been hired prior to competition.  It’s difficult to assess the performance of these coaches without being more closely involved in the program.  Additionally, as part time coaches with inadequate resources it’s difficult to find great fault with their efforts. In terms of the PATHF programs, Brazil has had full time European coaches in recent years and I suspect that Argentina and Chile’s coaches also receive more consistent support from their federations.

Summary

It’s possible that a team can compensate for a weakness in any of these areas.  I’ve seen superior raw athletic talent trump weak technical skills and I’ve also seen the reverse happen.  I’ve seen inexperienced teams do well with a good coach, and again I’ve seen the reverse as well. But, if you are at a disadvantage in all 5 areas (Women) and 4 out of 5 (Men) there’s simply no way you can expect anything but poor results.

Of course, there are a number of obvious steps that could be taken to improve in all of these areas.  If you need better raw talent, then do a better job of recruiting.  If your players are technically weak, well then train them to be better, etc., etc.,   All of this, however, is easier said than done.  In part 2, I’ll tackle the underlying reasons as to why the USA has struggled to field better teams and qualify for the Olympics.

In case you were wondering, I didn't drop any F-Bombs

Virtually everyone who’s ever been interviewed knows that the article that ends up getting written never fully captures everything that was said.  And all too often this can result in bits and pieces of what’s said getting quoted without the context of the entire conversation.  Going further, when there is information from multiple interviews being interspersed with analysis from the author sometimes the final product might lead to some assumptions from the reader.

Case in point is the recent article, “A Handball Nation with a Basketball Problem” by Gregg Gethard at the classical.org, a somewhat eclectic sports blog.  I had a great conversation with Gregg, who has become a fan of Team Handball and is one of those Americans relatively new to the sport trying to fathom why the sport isn’t very popular in this country.  I definitely like some of his analysis, particularly the part about THN being the “go-to source for any and all people in the US interested in the sport”.

But, I’d like to clear up a few things, in particular this part of the article:

“Team sports got devalued and the USOC started to tie funding to performance,” said John Ryan, the editor of TeamHandballNews.com, the go-to source for any and all people in the US interested in the sport. “That’s the biggest factor which caused us to become weaker.”

The second is—to be frank— that no one who ran USA Team Handball for most of its history knew what the f*** they were doing.”

I certainly made the first point as I do suspect that the USOC devalues team sports in that they are a lot of investment for 1 potential medal.  And it’s hard to argue that we weren’t more competitive when the USOC provided us with more funding.  But, just because I’m directly quoted on the first point, don’t make the inference that the second point is a paraphrasing of something that I might have said in continuance.  I didn’t drop any F-bombs and I disagree with the point entirely. While, I’ve had my share of disagreements with Mike Cavanaugh over many years and Steve Pastorino more recently, I think they knew what they were doing.  Call me an apologist if you will, but the challenges this sport has faced are massive.  Sure, there’s been some highly questionable management calls in the past, but even a super manager would have had more than a few failures.  If it was a no-brainer easy task to turn the USA into a Team Handball nation it would have been done years ago.

And also this paragraph:

“Ryan says there are probably somewhere between 300 and 500 people in the US who care at all about the sport. And all of those people have seemingly at some point served on the NGBs board of directors. And very few of these people liked each other.”

First sentence me, second sentence either the author or perhaps, Bogdan.  (He, is indeed a firebrand)

Now that, I’ve been an interviewer in addition to an interviewee, I know how these sorts of things happen.  Interviews sometimes run together and sometimes as a writer you do see emphasis and what’s interestingly from a different perspective.  And while some of it is a little misconstrued it does capture a lot of the problems our sport has faced in this country.

And it reminds me that I should do a post on the very same topic.  Although, I’ve written about many of these issues separately, I’ll try to put together a more comprehensive summary in the next few days.  And since the media questions are starting to trickle in and every reporter wonders why the U.S. isn’t at the Olympics I might as well take the time to answer it.

Main Stream Media reporting on Team Handball is great for the sport's promotion in the U.S., but the analysis often comes up short

Like clockwork, every four years, there’s a bump in media coverage for Team Handball in the U.S. as reporters and columnists are exposed to the sport during the Olympics.  While this increased exposure is great for our sport, I can’t help but get a little annoyed sometimes at the inaccuracies and naiveté that often comes with these stories.

Case in point is the feature article that Sean Gregory did four years ago for Time Magazine.  Overall, it was a very positive piece.  So much so, that a line from the article, “The rest of the world knows that this Olympic sport is ripe for an American invasion,” is prominently still displayed 4 years later on USA Team Handball’s Facebook page (see photo).  But, when Gregory stepped beyond his initial discovery of the game and presented some 2 second analysis of how to make the U.S. National Teams competitive the article devolved into total nonsense.  I’m not certain as to whether this was intentionally done for effect, but I wrote this response commentary just to make it clear how impractical his solutions were.

So, a short memo to all the mainstream reporters out there Googling for more information about this great sport you’ve just discovered:  Please do your research and don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.
Greatest (and not so greatest) hits:  Mainstream Media reporting on handball

Boston Globe (25 Aug 2004): Bob Ryan:  Give handball a sporting chance

Time Magazine (14 Aug 2008): Sean Gregory: Hey, America, What About Handball?
THN (14 Aug 2008):  Time Magazine: Thanks for promoting Team Handball, but save us your naïve solutions

National Review Online (15 Aug 2008): Mark Corallo  : An All-American Sport
THN (16 Aug 2008): National Review Online does hatchet job on Team Handball
(OK. The National Review Online isn’t a major news outlet, but it’s notable that occasionally there’s someone that actually doesn’t fall in love with the sport.)

Washington Post (23 Aug 2008) D.C. Sports Bog: Dan Steinberg: A Morning Jolt of Icelandic Team Handball:
(A great summary with several links to the numerous articles written related to Iceland’s run to the gold medal game in 2008.)

New York Times (9 May 2009): Stefan Fatsis:  Team Handball Has It All, Except an American Interest
(Credit to Fatsis, the dean of main stream reporters who’ve written about the sport.  This article and his periodic promotion of the sport at NPR gets the facts straight most of the time)