John Ryan

San Francisco CalHeat defeated Caciques Palmer 33-27 in the Gold Medal match last night to win the 2023 NACHC Club Championship. Caciques made CalHeat work harder for this win then their earlier meeting in Group play, a one sided 34-22 win. In fact, the match started out very evenly and Caciques trailed just 8-7 with 16 minutes remaining in the first half. However, at that point CalHeat took control of the match and went on 9-3 run over the next 10 minutes for a 17-10 lead. Caciques were able to

The U.S. played Puerto Rico in their last pool play match on Wednesday and it did not take them long to bounce back from Tuesday's disappointing loss to Mexico. Puerto Rico got the first goal of the game, but then the U.S. went on a 7-0 run to take a 7-1 lead. Puerto Rico managed to score a goal and then the U.S. promptly went on a 9-0 run to make the score 16-2. Puerto Rico was simply not on the same level as the more experience U.S. team. With the match well in hand, Coach Rot, cleared the ben

While he no longer will have an official capacity he will still be contributing to the sport as the coach of Air Force and, I would suspect in other ways as well. As long as I’ve been involved with the sport of team handball, there has always been one constant presence: Mike Cavanaugh. And, that’s literally true for anyone (and I mean anyone) involved with the sport in this country. Seriously, if you want to play the Kevin Bacon game for USA Team Handball you will be hard pressed to find anyone

The U.S. rebounded from an opening match loss yesterday with a huge 26-25 win over Cuba. Going into the match both sides knew that a loss would likely put them out of contention so it was no surprise that the match would be hotly contested.

The 2019 Pan American (PANAM) Games officially open on Friday, 26 July, but the Women’s Team Handball competition will get started two days earlier. Here’s some key information about the tournament and the nations that will be competing.

Coach Kirkely and I discuss Japan’s performance at the World Championships, handball organization/development in Japan and the future prospects for the Women’s team heading into the 2019 World Championships and 2020 Olympics, both of which will be hosted by Japan.

The USA Team Handball Collegiate Club Graveyard: Why have so many teams come and gone over the years? And what could be done to prevent this from happening?

Indeed, targeted recruitment of such athletes is the only viable solution if you want to improve national team performance in the near term. I, and others, have repeatedly argued that it’s a short term solution with some major limitations and significant long term drawbacks, but that’s not the focus for this particular commentary. The focus instead is how to make targeted recruiting work as well as possible. In other words, how can USA Team Handball apply some Moneyball like tactics to get the best players possible?

In Part 4, I pointed out that one factor limiting sponsor funding was the reality that there are very few followers of Team Handball in the U.S. In Part 5 I try to explain why there are so few and why this is such a big reason for the sports lack of success. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) Well, pretty much every American who’s ever been involved with the sport knows that it’s a little known sport in this country, but how “little known” is it. Over the years I’ve addressed this from a number of differ