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“The courses were quite tough and
the Master paper quite a challenge.
I was one of the youngest candidates,
alongside well-known names such
as Dagur Sigurdsson, Bob Hanning,
Klaus-Dieter Petersen and Christian
Schwarzer, who also completed the
Master Coach programme”
Raul Alonso, coach of Austrian national league club Schwaz Tirol,
after getting the EHF Master Coach certificate (2015)
The EHF launched further programmes
aimed at enhancing the quality of the game
and, in a broad-based effort, winning new
members for the handball family, especially
children and adolescents. Numerous
publications were issued in print and
video in order to make handball popular
in those countries where the sport lacks
a long-standing tradition. “The Steps to
Handball” was the title of a brochure published
in 1997. One year later, the EHF
launched the Mini Winnies project, which
used cartoon characters to teach children
not only handball, but also fair play.
Groundbreaking, finally, was the EHF
symposium on “Handball at School”,
which had been developed jointly with
the Hellenic Handball Federation and was
finally held in Thessaloniki from 25 to 27
April 2002. As a follow-up event, the
“Handball at school” conference was
staged on the fringes of the EHF 20 Men’s
European Championship in Innsbruck
(AUT) four years later. The key question
was: “How to motivate pupils/children and
how to motivate teachers/parents/universities.”
Participants from 24 countries
held a lively debate about potential solutions
and ideas. Today, the “Handball at
School” project, which has, of course, been
inspired by the Minihandball Day organised
in the early days of the EHF, is one of the
most successful and most important projects
in the evolution of European handball.
Professional support for EHF development
programmes is provided by a large
number of renowned EHF lecturers and
outside experts covering coaching, refereeing,
and beach handball.
In 2001, the S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Milestones,
Accepted, Realistic, Time-Limited)
programme was launched, which seeks to
support children and adolescents aged 10
to 18 in countries where handball must yet
be developed. This may involve, for example,
beach handball, but also the nomination
of young people for coaching and refereeing
courses and support in the shape of
balls or goals. These projects are evaluated
on an ongoing basis and terminated, if
targets are not met: “The EHF can stop the
support, if the implementation does not go
smoothly or the programme does not follow
the schedule agreed upon.”
And then the EHF created the Foster Project,
which encourages countries with a
long-established handball tradition to forge
partnerships with so-called “lesser handball
countries” for the purpose of transferring
their know-how. Again, this has been
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