Schools get a grip on handball

USA Team Handball isn’t something a lot of people have heard about or seen.

But collaborators at UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. Central University and Duke University hope it can become one of the country’s most popular sports.

“We have the opportunity to build a sport from the ground up,” said Mike Huff, coordinator of sports performance for the Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Laboratory at Duke University.

“It’s kinda fun to be involved with that kind of opportunity. You don’t always have to be a part of a high-profile sport.”

Handball, one of the world’s most popular sports, is little-known in the United States.

But having a centralized Olympic training center in the Triangle, as the universities want to do, would bring the sport into the limelight.

“It’s a sleeping giant in the United States,” said John Silva, chairman of the USA Team Handball Sports Science and Technology Committee and volunteer coach of the Carolina Team Handball Club. “It’s the best sport you’re never seeing.”

The three universities will pool staff, facilities and research to help USA Team Handball become a top international contender.

“The national team travels a lot. It’s difficult to do (international) exchanges,” said Silva, also a sport psychology professor at UNC-CH. “(The center) is going to raise the level of competition. We can elevate this sport to where it is competitive with the rest of the world.

Members of the Carolina Team Handball Club, who have won back-to-back USA Team Handball collegiate national championships, agree.

Blake Cloninger, a senior exercise and sport science major who has travelled and trained with USA Team Handball, said he hopes the center will establish a youth program to recruit younger generations to the sport.

“It’s hard to be competitive in a sport where you don’t (begin to) play until you’re older,” he said.

Support staff from sport psychology and exercise physiology from all three universities will be used.

“We are in this triangle here of Central, Duke and Carolina,” said LeRoy Walker, former chancellor of N.C. Central University and president of the U.S. Olympic Committee for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

“The medical staff brings a lot to the table for us. It’s very central in terms of the welfare of our young people.”

The staff will work together to study the sport, train and follow athletes and develop ways to prevent injury.

Silva said a permanent facility would probably be built either at Duke or N.C. Central. Housing for the athletes might be located in Durham.

Walker has been speaking with area businesses so the center can offer both full-time jobs and internship opportunities to athletes.

“Wherever you put an athlete in this Triangle, there’s 150 businesses,” he said.

Walker added that he is spending a good deal of his time looking for financial sponsors for the center, but he said he doesn’t think it will be difficult to earn their support.

“It’s an advantage they can utilize because they pay taxes,” he said. “We can become an excellent tax write-off.”

The Triangle was selected as the home for a centralized handball training center not only because of its area universities, research centers, jobs and housing opportunities but also because of its location.

It’s almost directly between the two main handball centers in the country — Atlanta and New York.

“We have a lot of facilities and resources here,” Cloninger said. “It’s a good general place year-round to train in.”

His UNC-CH teammate had a similar sentiment.

“It’s convenient to have a central location, particularly for those who will be in school,” said Alex McGlynn, a freshman who served as an alternate for the national team.

He noted that a permanent facility would be beneficial to the national team since it trains at two-week camps in different locations at different times.

“They’re not as efficient,” McGlynn said. “There’s not as much team unity.”

And unity is an important theme of the project.

“We think it’s going to work well,” Walker said. “We don’t want to be Duke-Carolina or Carolina-Central. We want this to be a unified proposition.”

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