The Resilience of UCC Olympic Handball Club

In a league dominated by Dublin-based clubs, one university team stands out navigating the challenges of distance and competition with unwavering enthusiasm.

Today we delve into the heart of University College Cork Olympic Handball Club (UCC HC), a resilient force in the Irish Handball League.

Discover how this spirited student club continues to thrive amidst the Dublin-dominated landscape, about the unique journey and their dedication to the game.

Read on for an exclusive glimpse into their handball journey shared by the club president, Emma.

Can you share us the steps of the UCC in developing the club?

I arrived in 2018, but the club was created around 2008 by two students who were handball players and a Polish coach. The second coach that came in 2011, did a lot of the work, Carlo, a German coach.

In that year, UCC came 2nd at the Irish Cup. They had students as presidents, but they were only on paper. The team had 2-3 Irish students and the rest were international. They usually had a really good team in the 1st semester, but in the second, they were struggling with all the Erasmus students gone. When they were telling me about this, they were saying that from the start, they had problems with UCC trying to keep non-students out of the club, even though they had a lot of interest in joining.

The women's team was created in 2016 and the opportunity to bring in two more coaches was created. During that moment, the club ran into a lot of financial issues due to poor student management. They started to be really active when Andrea was the president and got the best club award. From Andrea on, I would say the presidents were very much the people who were holding the club together.

Since 2014, the club has always been relying on this one person who would be doing the coaching, being president, doing most of the administrative work and also most of the promotion stuff. It has very much been a one-person job even though there were always people who helped.

I think what the previous presidents, Andrea, Gerard, and Alissa did, working on creating this friendly and fun atmosphere for international and beginner-friendly players, is what made UCC Handball Club survive so far. That's what we are trying to keep doing.

All clubs in UCC rely on the shoulders of a few students, and we are not the only one in this situation. Everyone is working hard to make their club work.

Who can play in the UCC, and what is your recruitment process?

UCC has a very strict policy when it comes to who can play for us. The club is strictly limited to students, UCC staff and alumni can be granted memberships but for a registration fee. However, we need to do a lot of paperwork to prove that the club would benefit from their presence and that we do not have enough student players. Then the only position that we can fill with non-UCC students is the coach position. We can have 2 to 3 coaches.

UCC is really reluctant to have anyone else taken in : first, insurance, but that can be easily solved because people can have their own insurance and provide proof of insurance. However, I think that the biggest concern would be if we get people from outside, we wouldn't give priority to students anymore, and if we start  receing non-student players, then we most probably not bother training UCC student beginners, for example.

The last two years, we always managed to get quite a good number of students even though there were a lot of people coming and going and a lot of beginners.

Any UCC student that wants to join the club and the league is more than welcome to do so, regardless of handball knowledge or experience. We have no minimum level, and we get lots of beginners.

What is the university offering to the members and do you think that needs more attention or support from their side?

The transportation to games is covered by UCC, the accommodation when we go to tournaments. Basically, the students coming to the club have to pay for the league registration and a small contribution to tournaments. That's it, all the rest is covered by UCC.

While we don't receive amazing funding, it covers the essential things. We could do more with additional funds, but at least it takes care of the expenses.

As a student club, what are the main challenges you are facing?

I think being a student club in the league gives us some disadvantages, both in terms of management and the development of players and skill levels. Dealing with half of the players being beginners every semester or having the players renewed each semester makes it challenging for us to progress as a team and individually. Club management also faces a substantial workload and responsibilities, which adds to the difficulty. Our training times, not suitable for most coaches, unfortunately.

The response has often been that we overly funded compared to other clubs because we are a university club. This argument doesn't hold as our funds come from student fees, and we are not getting money out of nowhere. Additionally, we've been suggested several times to break from UCC and create our own club if we're not happy with how things are. I don't think this is a solution. We know the problem with halls in Ireland, especially in Cork where there is only 1 hall that can host handball games. We cannot really break from them, and we've also seen what happens with Cork Handball Club.

The level of UCC, depending on the years, has been much lower than other clubs, and I can understand that it is not ideal to have a league with such a big level gap. Sometimes we feel we don't always get the support or the recognition of the work we are doing to develop handball in Cork, all the work we put into training beginners.

Could you elaborate in detail how you engage the students to help the club management, to play, and remain in the club?

90% of the players leave after one semester, and that poses a real challenge in terms of club management because the club's management has to be handled by the students. This aligns with another UCC rule: you cannot have anyone on the committee who is not a UCC student. Even when I was staff, I could not be on the committee. The club is for students and run by students. Typically, our club management relies on 2-3 students, although we might have a larger committee with people willing to help for a bit. However, the majority of the work is carried out by 2-3 students.

So, at the beginning of each semester, we try to find students who are willing to get involved in the club committee. Most Erasmus students want to have fun, and they are too busy for additional responsibilities. Also, I don't think the reason these people leave is dissatisfaction with the club experience, they leave the country. There's no way to make them remain in the club, it's just relevant in that case.

From all the students that have joined so far, how dedicated are they to play in the Irish League and from where they come?

Students that are here for a longer time become the presidents. To be fair, anyone who enters the club and is planning to be in UCC for the next 4 - 5 years is immediately considered for the presidency of the club. So, we had a few PhD students who have been presidents in the past, that was the case for Andrea, Gerard, and myself. In between, we had Alissa, who was also here for a full degree. Besides us, I don't really see many people who have been there for a number of years. We have a couple of students this year hoping to take the board in the next few years.

In a good year, we start in September with 6 players from the year before. This year, there were only 3 of us. We had a look last year, we had members from 17 different countries. The most common nationalities are French and German. 35% of our active members were players who had played handball at home, and then we had 65% beginners. We really had to teach them the basic rules. Overall, the students are really enthusiastic about playing in the league, participating in tournaments. They are still here to enjoy for a limited spread of time. They don't want to spend all their weekends travelling up and down to Dublin for 1 game.

Is the majority of the club composed of members from abroad, or are there Irish individuals expressing interest as well?

I would say that we still have most of our players visiting students, maybe around 90% of them are foreigners just one semester, two at most. To be fair, we are getting more and more Irish students, and I would attribute this to two reasons: firstly, because it has been one of our goals for a few years to recruit more Irish players in order to achieve greater stability in terms of numbers. Secondly, I believe João Ferreira and Caroline Nerbas, have done a commendable job in improving the presence of handball in schools, and we're starting to see the impact. It's been about two years since our club started attracting Irish students who say, "We tried handball at school, and it was fun, so we thought it might be nice to join the club." Perhaps they've only had a couple of sessions, but at least they know what handball is, which wasn't really the case five years ago. I've noticed a positive change in that aspect.

During our last training session, about half of the students were Irish. For me, that's a significant win, and it's something I've been advocating for a long time. I mentioned it at the last meeting we had back in December because it's definitely a positive development we've observed recently. I firmly believe that handball won't have a future in Ireland if we don't start attracting more Irish players. It can't remain solely a sport for foreigners in Ireland.

Another factor that seems to attract Irish students to our club is the limited availability of beginner-friendly clubs in University, especially when it comes to team sports. This was also the reason why I joined handball in the first place at UCC.

We cannot run as a club without beginners. We need them in terms of numbers, so there was a point when it was also a very practical decision – "If we want to keep running, we need to have more players and welcome beginners."

We've also seen how rewarding it could be seeing how people progress. That's really rewarding for both players on the team and as a coach. I think we both have

experienced being so happy for the first goal of someone who had just started. That also became part of the fun of the club for the new players.

Starting a team sport as a grown-up can be challenging, and I think many Irish students appreciate the opportunity to begin a team sport with other beginners, not feeling lost as the only newcomer. Over the years, credit goes to the previous presidents like Gerard and Alissa, they've done an excellent job involving beginners, working with them, and providing the necessary basics.

Are there any handball coaching resources for skill development within the university?

Olympic Handball Ireland has such offers, at least this is written on their website. For example, the second coach that I found for this semester was willing to take such a course. I contacted, João and Andrea and it didn't seem that easy to make it happen. They were saying that it would happen only in a few months.

We don't really have opportunities to train coaches.

Until this year, Cork city had only one handball club, UCC. However, in 2023, a second club, Cork Handball Club, was established. Are you considering any potential collaborations between the two clubs in the near future?

We were genuinely happy when we learned about the creation of the second club in Cork. Finally we had a club where we could redirect all the requests that we were getting from non-student players. People were emailing us or DM us on social media every week. So, we finally send them to  club.

We look forward to collaborations. For instance, we believed it would help with the referee situation in Cork because we always struggled to have referees for our home games.

We were consistently told that we needed to work on getting referees in Cork. However, training our own players to become our referees didn't really make sense, as we are not able to referee our own games. Having a second club would give us a reason to push for student registrations for referee training.

Cork Handball Club actually provided one referee this year, and he is helping our home games, which is really nice. The situation for Cork Handball Club since the beginning of the season is not simple. I think you might be aware of it. I've met with Marin several times, but they have been struggling a lot. We are very much in touch, but we didn't manage to help them regarding the hall situation. The UCC hall is always booked out for students, so they would not allow it for any other clubs.

If there was anything we could do for them, we would. We organized a friendly game in October that was really fun. I think their club didn't make any collaboration possible, and I think this is beyond our control. Having a handball club in Cork and developed would definitely be beneficial to us as well.

Being a club located in Cork, how easy it is to collaborate with other organizations to promote the sport, as the majority are in Dublin?

That's true, handball has been focused on the Dublin area, especially in the last few years. I've been told that it wasn't always the case, that there were many more clubs outside of Dublin before, but I wasn't aware of it.

The biggest impact of this has been on refereeing. In the last few years, was not always sending referees to Cork, usually only one coming from Dublin. And up until last year, the travelling cost of the referee was completely covered by our club. Last year, Alissa said that it wasn't fair, and we started splitting the travelling cost between the two clubs that were playing. So, we are thankful that's changed because it also had a financial impact on us.

Every time we had this problem with referees, we were told that we need to work on having referees in Cork. When we were told this last year, we said, "Okay, we're going to take it into account. We're working on this." So, we worked on advertising and recruiting referees in Cork, and we had volunteers, 3 - 4 volunteers that were outside UCC, willing to do the training. They told us, "We will set up training and send people to evaluate them in Cork." That did not happen. They did one online training, and then they were sent to referee official games without any support  and supervision.

It was a total car crash because these people were absolutely not ready to referee, which made very difficult moment for everyone. It was very  hard to see them in such a situation.

This year we are lucky to have Cork Handball Club and Luka from Dublin International. This year the situation is pretty okay with the referees, we can't complain but relying on 2 people.

How do you feel about the invitation to watch the IHF World Women's Handball

Championship at the cinema on December 17th in Dublin, considering the cost of 5 euros? Did you feel included coming to see it? How did you find the initiative?

None of us would come to join, of course, it's in Dublin, it is not for us, as it's too far and we cannot join. I wouldn't see it as a bad idea. If they can organize in Dublin and the clubs can join, we are happy. There's no jealousy from us in that way.

What is more problematic for me is the meetings. When that is set up, we are not really taken into consideration, and I think that they should give us the option to at least join online for general meetings.

The first meeting happened this season, the general meeting, there was no way we could join. The second meeting was after our game, that was okay, and we joined.

Being the only club from outside of Dublin in the league makes it more difficult to be part of this community. That's for sure, travelling to Dublin for meetings or games, is our biggest challenge.

Olympic Handball Ireland is in collaboration with the Cork Sports Partnership. Is there any plan in collaborating with them in promoting the handball locally too?

I haven't heard about any collaboration plans. I know that Cork Handball Club was linked with the Cork Sports Partnership, and also some of our members last year said about the opportunity to go to schools to help school teachers plan handball sessions through . I think that was also with the Cork Sports Partnership, but I don't think it ever happened. I think we had a few students interested, especially since they were ready to pay them, but I think it just did not happen. Cork Sports Partnership has never been in contact with us directly.

What were the contributing factors to the decision for the Men's team not to participate in the league?

The year after Covid, we also didn't have a men's team. It's always a question of numbers. When we started planning the schedule in August, we had no clue how many students we would have. By the end of September, we had around 4-5 guys coming to training, and all of them were beginners. At that point, with 5 beginner guys, there's no way I could set up a team. That's why we didn't register them. It's always a matter of numbers first, but also level especially with the guys. You can have beginners, but you need people who know what they are doing, otherwise, there's no point.

By the end of the semester, we had 6 guys coming to training. One of the difficulties is that we don't register them because we don't have enough, but then if we don't have a competition to motivate them, it's hard to keep them. We kept them with the idea of organizing friendly games and having tournaments during the second semester. I think we have a core of guys who are pretty motivated, even though they are beginners, and we have a few more who joined this semester. We are hoping to have a team for tournaments this semester to register the men's team for the cup.

What initiatives or strategies do you have in place to attract and engage students from different backgrounds, and how can Olympic Handball Ireland help?

Every beginning of the semester, we advertise our club at UCC events, social networks, and also this summer we had posters and flyers in all student accommodations in Cork, so everywhere across the city and groups for international students.

These players are here to enjoy. They are here to study abroad, but mostly to enjoy Erasmus, so we communicate a lot about how fun and international the club is. We also organize a lot of social events, trying to create this fun and cohesive team, which makes them feel involved in such a club because they are not here to be in a super serious club. That's not their point, usually. Then, as I said, being a beginner-friendly club is also a way to attract people and to attract Irish students as well.

What they can do... I mean, first, the thing that was implemented a few years ago to be able to register for the league only for one semester was something that helped a lot in having students for the league reluctant to pay for the full registration if they only stay one semester.

I think our biggest problem so far is recruiting coaches who would take over the training preparation and lead training. Because if we had more structured training and coaching, that would also improve the engagement from students. I think we would benefit from the promotion of coaching courses, and maybe if the promotion is done well, former players be more eager to become coaches and volunteer for coaching positions. That's mostly what I would say because otherwise I don't really see how Olympic Handball Ireland could help in the recruitment process.

What are your current projects and goals for the future?

Our ongoing initiatives and future aspirations revolve around: training new coaching volunteers, getting more students involved in the management of the club, going back to two fully competitive teams: both men and women and organizing a student intervarsity in Cork Belfast, UCD, maybe Limerick, Galway.

Is there anything else you'd like to share or any message you'd like to convey?

I think there's a really good atmosphere in UCC. If it was not for this, I

wouldn't do all this work. Getting to know other players from other clubs makes the whole thing nicer as well because you are happy playing against each other and having fun.

That's what Amanda and Amina pointed out, the three of us really just want to have fun again. It is a small league, a lot of issues out of our control in terms of halls, not having many players in Ireland. That's OK! This is how it is. Let's just try to have fun with what it is. This is also how we grow. We only grow if we can attract by being fun, having people that are still interested.

People like Amanda and Amina keep us going as well. People that are interested in keeping the good work and making it a community thing of helping each other. Just working together and having fun together.

We need to go away from this frustration against each other and start going towards something more positive from all sides. Just trying to face the reality of what it is, otherwise, we just stay in our frustration of not getting what we want.

Hopefully things will move on, we are just hoping for the best for everyone.

UCC Handball Club has been a longstanding presence in Cork, consistently contributing to the promotion and development of handball in the city. Despite being the sole club for a significant period and run by students, their continuous efforts have played a crucial role in keeping the spirit of handball alive. Their dedication is particularly notable in their work with beginners and their focus on attracting Irish players, essential for the growth and widespread adoption of handball in the broader Irish community.

Recognition for their hard work should extend beyond just the outcomes but also acknowledge the continuous effort invested. In the handball community, where everyone is striving to make a positive impact, appreciation for collective efforts becomes paramount.

We extend our heartfelt congratulations to every individual who has played a part in the history of this club and continues to contribute to its ongoing success in keeping handball active in Cork. Your passion for the sport, unwavering commitment to welcoming and instructing beginners, and resilient attitude in overcoming challenges are truly commendable. Your dedication to the sport is much appreciated, and we encourage you to keep up the excellent work!