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U.S. Team Sheds Light On Unfamiliar Sport

Derek Brown was about to graduate from La Salle University in Philadelphia in May 1993 when he stepped onto the court to play team handball for the first time. He practiced for a week with players who were training at La Salle for this summer's Olympic Games. The coach invited him to join the team, but Brown said no. He had made a prior commitment to work for an insurance firm after graduation.

But after three months at his job at home in Southeast Washington, Brown decided to give team handball another try. He quit his job, packed up his bags and moved back to the La Salle campus to train with the team. Today, Brown, who competed in track and basketball at Gonzaga High School, is one of the top scorers on USA team handball and is headed for the Olympics in Atlanta. The team plays its first match against Sweden July 24 at the Georgia Dome.

"Once I became an athlete and knew that there was an opportunity that athletes can become Olympians, I knew that was something I wanted to do," Brown said during a recent visit with his parents and two sisters in Southeast. "I never really expressed it too much. It was just an internal thing."

Brown, who was on the track team at La Salle, said he thought track might offer him a chance to participate in the Olympics, but he did not excel well enough to compete at the Olympic trials in 1992 and this year.

"I was pretty much thinking that the Olympic dream would be over until team handball came around," he said. "It's such a great feeling knowing that I am an Olympian. . . . Every time I tell someone that I'm getting ready to be in my first Olympics, I just start beaming."

After beaming, Brown, 26, generally has to explain what team handball is, since the sport is more popular in Europe, where it began in the 1920s. "It's exactly like water polo, except we are on a court and not in the water," Brown said. He said the sport combines techniques from the sports of basketball, hockey, rugby and soccer.

team handball was first introduced at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as an outdoor game with teams of 11 players. It did not appear at the Olympic Games again until 1972, when it was played indoors with seven players on each side.

The sport uses running, jumping, catching and throwing in a fast-paced game in which the objective is to pass the ball quickly and then throw it past a goalie into the goal. The game is played in two 30-minute halves.

Brown said most of his teammates are refugees from sports such as basketball, football and soccer. The most experienced players have participated in the sport since 1989.

The team going to the 1996 Games has been training since March 1994 outside Atlanta in Cobb County. Much of the competition has come in matches in foreign countries, and France is the defending world champion in men's team handball. The best Olympic finish for the United States came in the 1984 Olympics when the women tied for fourth and the men finished ninth.

"In the past, we were pretty much the team that everyone wanted to play because they felt they could get a win out of us," Brown said. "The last two years, we have been playing well and we have improved every time we have played."