Kia ora koutou, Aotearoa Handball Whānau!
March already, and time for a quick update as another summer of beach handball draws to a close and indoor training starts to crank up around the country.
First up it’s youth handball. Fantastic to see the latest initiative to grow our secondary school playing base throw off last month, with the successful launch of the Porirua Secondary Schools League. Exciting to see some fresh new talent experience the fun of handball. Big shout out to Porirua Handball and Ben Potaka for making that happen.
At the same time, our established programmes for supporting youth handball in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin continue, with some great mahi being put in by our wonderful volunteers around the country to nurture our emerging talent. We also continue to enjoy great support from our key strategic partner The Goethe Institut supplying kit for Das Kiwi Handball Projekt and other initiatives at the intermediate school level, with some exciting plans afoot in that space. If you have connections with a primary or intermediate school that you think would be interested in experiencing some fun handball to start the kids on a lifetime handball journey, please get in touch.
At the high performance end of our youth programme, our Men’s Under 19 Team’s preparations for the 2023 Men’s U19 World Champs are well underway. With the tournament scheduled to take place in Croatia in August it’s a massive commitment from all those involved, but they are up for the task and early signs are encouraging. With around $12k per player needed to get them there, a major fundraising campaign is under way – https://nzyouthhandball.raisely.com. If you have connections with any organisations that might be interested in sponsoring the team, please reach out to youth@handball.org.nz – we’d love to hear from you.
On the beach front, we have had another well-attended series in Christchurch over the New Zealand version of summer. Congrats to the Northern men and the Southern Women for taking out the best of three North-South clashes, and to the Parrots (Men) and Otago Toroa (Women) for taking out the Beach Club Champs. Eyes now turn to the international front, where the Men’s and Women’s Teams will have their jobs cut out for them as they compete at Coolangatta over ANZAC Weekend in the Oceania qualifiers for the World Beach Games and next year’s World Champs. Another fundraising campaign is underway to help with that, so once again keep an eye out for opportunities to support your national teams go out and do it for New Zealand.
Looking ahead to the indoor season, the major tournaments schedule for the year is now all locked and loaded, and first up it’s everyone’s favourite, the Queenstown Social Tournament on 1-2 April. See 2023 National Tournaments for the schedule. As a nearly heads up, National Club Champs will be held at Wellington’s fabulous renamed Ākau Tangi Sports Centre on 8-10 September – as with last year, it’s a full three day event. We are scheduled to throw off from 9am on the opening Friday of the tournament, with finals likely to be mid-late afternoon on the 10th. This year we have booked for games to take place on the Friday evening so we can allow teams a bit more rest time between games. If you are planning on travelling to Wellington from out of town, please factor in that timing. And we have already had interest in attending expressed from an Australian Club, so looking forward to some international competition on our home turf – it’s been a while!
Last for this update, the NZHF Exec is working through the outputs from last December’s strategy session – thanks again to all those Club and Regional Association reps who took part in that. It’s clear we have some challenges ahead, but encouraging to have depth in our volunteer base across the country to take on those challenges. Our plan is to share the key updates to NZHF’s strategy next month, along with confirmation of the subs and affiliation fees for the current year. I’m sure you are all hanging out for that.
Yours in handball
David Ireland
President, New Zealand Handball Federation