Meet The New South African Handball Generation by Matome Rampyapedi

Two weeks ago the South African senior national teams, both ladies and gents, had a friendly outing to their neibouring country, Mozambique. This was initially supposed to be a tournament between SA, Mozambique and Angola, but the Angolan team pulled out of the tournament late after confirming that they would be part of the event. This then left only SA and the hosts only in the tournament. This trip was a very important one for the SA national team because both the squads had been revamped and so it served as a good test for both the teams. It seems both coaches of the national teams had the same idea in picking the players as teams were relatively “young” compared to recent years. And interesting enough, even the coaching staff were revamped; the ex-coach for the male senior side, Rapule Thebyane was now given the honour to coach the ladies, while the now retired and long serving former captain of the senior national side, Kgomotso Motetsoe had been given the next best level of leadership as head coach for the male senior national team. Both teams played two matches, on the court, and one beach handball match. The men team drew their first match but lost the second one. In my opinion,the team played very well considering that more than 60% of the team was new in the green and gold. And the ladies lost one and won their second match. This was a huge pointer for the team, you could see it in their faces after the match was dusted, they hadn’t won any international match in a long while and things were finally coming together after the drought. The biggest challenge came when the teams had to play beach handball.I am saying this because none of the players had ever played any sort of handball outside the court and now they had to do it wearing the national colours. But they showed character and both teams beat the Mozambique squads at the beach, even after they were taught the rules 30 min before they played! But all in all, this was a good outing for the South African guys and girls.I am hoping the teams will get more matches and training camps so that they will really gel and grow from this point on.