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.