Canadian Handball Team Battling Lack of Funds, Stiff Competition at Pan Ams

The absolute first thing you need to know about European handball is that it is constantly traversing. The laws of the game state that you can't spend more than three seconds with the ball and you can't take more than three steps. So the game moves through whipping the child-like ball up and down the court where an endless stream of goals are scored. There's no 1–0 score line. You don't take off your shirt and celebrate because you scored a goal. Play is constant. The ball travels back to the middle from the goalie and play resumes in a hurry. Canadian handball team captain Daniel Devlin describes the game as "water polo on land."

I had seen a game or two on TV many years ago and vaguely remember it was fast like hockey, the players were brutes, they wore no padding and they would wrestle with each other over the ball to score goals with their hands. If we were in Roman times, I could have sworn match play resembled a sport that belonged in a Colosseum. It left an intrigue with me I haven't been able to exorcise until the Pan Am Games.

Canada, ranked 42nd in the world, came up short against Brazil (13th) in what was your classic David versus Goliath encounter at Exhibition Centre on Friday. There were many lopsided statistics favouring Brazil, which carried 530 international games worth of experience into the match against Canada's 203. Canadian head coach Jean-Francois Grimala believes Brazil had $1.5 million allocated to its previous Pan Am Games handball program, while Canada gets no funding from Sport Canada. It was no surprise then that Brazil won 34-17. Canada did win its next match against the Dominican Republic and wraps up the preliminary stage Tuesday versus Uruguay.

Handball in Canada—even though there is a national team and it vies for spots to compete at the Olympic level—is still considered a niche, amateur sport. But try telling that to the national players.

To be a Canadian handball player you need a job to help fund your career. Consider this: Devlin was an emergency ward nurse for eight years which played second fiddle to the sport. Any spare time and money would go toward handball costs. One year, he said, he spent close to $20,000 on physiotherapy, personal trainers, travel expenses and equipment. That doesn't include loss of income for those weeks spent at national training camps, European tournaments or world championship qualifiers. The average cost per player, per year, to play handball is estimated between $10,000–15,000, said Devlin. Other national players are teachers, have kids, and some are lucky enough to be able to play professionally in Europe in between major tournaments. So why do they sacrifice as much as they do for a sport that eats into their wallet? They crave it.

"It's a huge problem, trying to keep talent. Young players can't afford it. You can play a competitive game to a certain extent, then the next level—because there isn't that level in Canada—you have to go somewhere else," he said. "You have to be part of a team that travels. You have to pay that money. That's what makes it hard."

Devlin, 31, started the sport 15 years ago and was hooked on how physical it was and reveled in the travel the sport required. His first few tours involved jaunts to France, Sweden and Denmark. Coming from a rugby and hockey background, handball filled an intense void that he felt was missing from those sports. Most players in Canada that sign up for handball hail from basketball and hockey sports.

Handball rules are very simple. Each team has seven players. There are two 30-minute halves. You can't kick the ball into the goals to score; goals must be scored by throwing the ball. There are no offsides. There's no shot clock. You can sub players on and off the bench on the fly (including goalies). And there are lots of goals. In a game between Argentina (a team boasting 1,333 games of international experience) and Cuba, 14 goals had been scored 12 minutes into the first half. Unlike soccer or hockey, where goals are as rare as hen's teeth, scoring is as easy as drinking water from a tap. Goals are being scored at an average rate of around one per minute at the Pan Ams. There are a legion of ways to score goals: the fast break goal, the flying jump shot goal (this is the true centerpiece of handball), the basketball bounce-pass goal, the loft-over-the-head goal, the flick-and-spin goal and the alley-oop goal.

The six-metre painted arc surrounding the goalie is an important piece of the puzzle. It's called the D-zone. It looks like an NBA 3-point line—only the goalie can be inside it. Players need to shoot at goal before they hit the D-zone arc but there's a catch: they can jump in the air over the D-zone arc and fire off a shot. It's made even more impressive when there's a huddle of players guarding the D-zone and the team with the ball has to bust the pack in order to score. One of the main aims for defenders is to protect the six-metre arc through zones or man-to-man defense the same way NBA defenders sit in certain spots to make it onerous to score. There's no diving like soccer and there's no arguing with the referee. The game is just too quick to be caught up in semantics.

Devlin was captivated by handball's visceral charm. There's a torrent of shirt pulling, accidental headlocks, arms around necks and errant hands in faces and eye sockets. There are wrap-up tackles that result in fouls or cards, and the bigger you are, the easier it is for you to bash through defensive packs to score. But small players thrive, too. Good teams like Brazil and Argentina are able to use its smaller players to move the ball up the court in a slick fashion to conjure up fast breaks and open spaces—teams like Canada and Cuba fumble the ball too often and manufacture slow build ups that result in turnovers.

The sport was inducted at the Pan Am Games in 1987. It's been an Olympic indoor sport since 1972 and was first tried as an outdoor sport in Berlin in 1936. The Canadian men's team finished fourth at the Pan Ams in 1987 and 1991, while the women's team won three silver medals in a row between 1987 and 1999. There are 6,500 people registered to play the sport, according to the Canada Handball Federation. Each Canadian province has a federation, and there are two national tournaments played each year.

National training sessions are few and far between, with a handful of gatherings organized each year, leaving Canada to barely cope on the international stage. Canada has completed seven training camps and an estimated 24 matches against European competition over the last three years. The road to Pan Am was made easier by circumventing the Americas Championships. Grimala wasn't surprised Brazil pummeled his team—the Brazilians overcame Russia in the World Championships in 2013 and he called its Pan Am handball campaign a "different world."

"Assembling a team, we always come back to the same question: how much money do we have?" he said. "You can work on 50 plans but the budget dictates what you can do and you can only do so much."

Grimala said the team received $60,000 from the International Olympic Committee, which he called a "bonus" and likened it to if Ghana sought funds to play international hockey.

"You win, you get money. You don't win, you don't get money. Our national federation is lacking funds. It's a very complicated story. We survive on cost-sharing among the players, volunteer coaches and physiotherapists," he said. "It's about getting back to basics. What we did in the '70s and '80s. We promote mini handball for the kids. We had a training camp in June in Montreal, where a French pro team came to play with us. That crowd was a bigger crowd than here at Pan Am."