Tēnā Koutou, Aotearoa Handball supporters
A busy past month for New Zealand Handball. Much mahi has been put in on multiple fronts off the court, as well as on court success in the form of another successful annual Queenstown Social Tournament to kick off the indoor season. Congrats to Leo and the Queenstown Handball team for pulling that off, great to see the camaraderie that is New Zealand Handball on display once again. Next national tournament cab off the rank is the Auckland Open on May 20-21, which is shaping up to be another goodie.
The big ticket item for your Exec has been progressing our strategic plan to ensure we are focusing our efforts for maximum impact. Our vision, purpose and values remain the same – the key objective remains to grow New Zealand Handball to its full potential and deliver great Handball opportunities for all. It’s the paths we follow to get there where you will see some changes.
Feeding off the very constructive Club and Regional Associations strategy session last December, there are three broad strategic pillars to our go forward strategy:
Governance: The framework within which New Zealand Handball operates needs to be effective
Lifting the Standard: Everything we do is of a high standard and professionally run.
Growing the Base: Player and administrator numbers are increasing with good retention and all regions thriving.
All three pillars are important and all are interconnected, but the main focus for now is on Growing the Base. To that end we have identified our top ten priority initiatives to deliver on the strategic pillars. They include the newly formed Women’s Working Group, development of a player pathway, regular regional meetings to be kicked off by an engagement survey coming your way next month, clearer processes for appointing our coaches, and coach and referee development. We will post this up on the website in the coming weeks.
A key component of our overall strategy is fostering strong relationships with our strategic partners. We already have enduring relationships in place with Sport NZ, the Goethe Institut, and TAB NZ. Last month we were delighted to announce last month our signing of Select New Zealand as our preferred supplier of Handball kit for our indoor Handball representative teams moving forward. You can check out their great range of clothing here https://www.freedom2play.co.nz/collections/nz-handball. We encourage all our community to take advantage of what is on offer. If any of our Clubs or Regions are thinking of re-kitting their teams, please consider Select as an option. Use the code NZHF1 when ordering from the website to unlock a 20% discount across the SELECT range, excluding clothing.
Fostering the next generation of senior players is a critical part of the strategy, and it is really encouraging to see the momentum of our Men’s Youth Team being maintained as they work towards the World Youth Champs in August. They have received great support from the local and international community in their fundraising efforts to date, for which they are extremely grateful – but there is still a long way to go! If you think you might be able to help out, check out their fundraising page https://nzyouthhandball.raisely.com.
While we are on the subject of Youth Handball, the call is out for female players born on 1 January 2004 or younger to join our Women’s Youth and Junior Teams to compete in the IHF Trophy Oceania Qualifiers later this year. That’s the pathway our Youth Men took last year to qualify for this year’s World Champs, and it would be fantastic if one or both of their equivalent Women’s teams could follow in their footsteps. Links to the EOIs can be found on our March 23 post, with applications closing on 30 April. If you know of any budding young female stars who have yet to register their interest, please encourage them to do so.
On the High Performance front, we are in the full swing of preparing our indoor Handball squads to target international tournaments. The High performance organisers are running an ALL National teams camp on the 23rd June - 25th June in Christchurch. The vision for this camp is to reconnect with all programmes in the one place, utilising the skills and experience we have to help all levels of Handball. If you are a player interesting in developing your skills in New Zealand please reach out through the NZHF social media – someone will be in touch.
Calling out all foreign players and coaches based in New Zealand who want to be involved in the New Zealand handball journey – please sing out if you want to be involved in more handball! Contact high-performance@handball.org.nz for more details.
Finally, the weekend of April 21-23 sees the Oceania Beach Handball Qualifiers take place in Coolangatta. It is going to be a stiff challenge for our Men’s and Women’s rep teams to get over the line, but they couldn’t be better prepared to take on that challenge. All the best guys, we know you will do the country proud!
David Ireland
President
New Zealand Handball Federation