Waiting for Its Day On a Court

It is basketball without the basket.

Water polo without the water.

Ice hockey without the ice.

It is called team handball, a strange mixture of several sports that always seems to draw chuckles at events like the U.S. Olympic Festival, which concludes here today.

That is, until people see team handball. Then it draws fans.

“People at the Olympics or the Festival always seem to get team handball tickets at first because those are the ones that are always left,” says Darleen Branigan of Canoga Park. “But as the Festival goes on, the stands get fuller and fuller because the word gets out that this is the game.

“It’s a game that is played the American way. It’s aggressive, there’s constant action and the officials pretty much let the players go, although they always maintain control.”

Branigan is more than just a fan. She has played team handball in Festivals for five years, having moved to the sidelines this time to coach the West squad.

She has a full-time job as an instructor and coach at Glendale College.

Branigan began like so many other team handball players--on a basketball court. She played at El Camino Real High, for Cal and Cal State Northridge.

She was in Northern California in 1981 when she heard about tryouts for the Festival for this weird sport called team handball.

On a whim, she tried out. Keep in mind that she not only had never played the sport, she had never even seen it.

No matter. Branigan made the team.

That’s not as shocking as it might sound. Her basketball skills were easily transferable to the team handball court and she wasn’t exactly dominated by a hundred grizzled veterans who had played the sport for years.

Branigan, though, is now such a veteran.

She’s involved with team handball at a club level in California. There is a team handball women’s league consisting of Cal West (Branigan’s team, composed of players everywhere from Compton to West Los Angeles to Canoga Park), a squad in Fullerton and the Ventura Condors. There is also a club in Northern California--Cal Heat--which occasionally plays its southern rivals.

There are five annual tournaments staged by the league. And the past two years, there has been a team handball state championship--won both times by Cal West.

Branigan says the sport has its limitations but is also a viable athletic alternative.

“With football in the fall,” she says, “and basketball in winter and softball and baseball in the spring, there is no room to fit team handball into the intercollegiate schedule.

“But I think it’s ideal for athletes who have graduated from college, especially women who have nothing to go on to. We are also trying to introduce team handball into the junior highs and high schools.”

For many Southern Californians, they first became aware of the sport in the 1984 Olympics. Some thought it had been invented overnight just for the Games.

Sure, like the Soviets invented baseball.

Although many European countries claim to be the game’s originator, the International Handball Federation gives that distinction to Denmark, where it was devised at the turn of the century to give soccer players a way to stay in shape while staying indoors during those long, frigid Scandinavian winters.

The IHF says it has 4.2 million members in more than 88 countries, which would make team handball the world’s second most popular sport behind soccer.

The thought that the sport began in this country at the ’84 Games would come as news to the U.S. Team Handball Federation, which was formed in 1959.

So just how do you play team handball?

At first glance, it looks like basketball. There’s a backcourt player, who dribbles up the floor like a basketball point guard, using what looks like a small volleyball.

When the backcourt player comes into the frontcourt, there are defenders, like in basketball, bumping with their bodies, making contact in a theoretically non-contact sport. There are cross-court passes, picks, everything you’d see in a basketball game.

Except the basket.

Instead, there is a netted goal, complete with goalie, such as you’d find in soccer or hockey.

The object is to throw the ball into the net.

Sound simple? It is except that there can be as many as four defenders crashing into the would-be shooter, doing everything possible to prevent him or her from getting that throw off. Suddenly, it looks like Dan Marino facing an all-out blitz. Team handball defenders are about as anxious to avoid hard contact as Lawrence Taylor.

Players are not allowed to shoot within a six-meter area around the goal.

At least not on the floor of that area.

But the rules don’t prohibit aerial attacks. So most scores come when the offensive player takes off at the six-meter line, soars toward the goalie and fires the ball while still in midair.

Only then can the player start thinking about his or her next problem, how to land as safely as possible on the hardwood floor.

Ever hear the cheers at the Forum when Kurt Rambis dives headfirst after a loose ball or Michael Cooper takes off for a Coop-a-Loop and then comes roaring back to earth?

Well, in team handball, that stuff happens, oh, about 80 to 100 times a game.

If this sport ever gets enough exposure, who knows? It might undergo a popularity explosion that could bury other sports.

Fifty years from now, you might find yourself trying to interest your grandchildren in basketball.

We heard they used to play it a lot in the old days, they’ll say. What are the rules?

Well, you’ll reply, it’s kind of like . . . uh, team handball without the goal.