Nagpur News :
The 21st Jr National Korfball championship was inagurated on 6th March 2014 at RTM Nagpur University grounds. The tournament was inagurated by Ashish Deshmukh the international president for woodball and a host of other dignetories. Speaking on the occasion Mr Deshmukh said the importance of such sports in daily life and that youth should come forward to play them as this is the easy way to get to olympics.
Korfball is a mixed gender ball sport, with similarities to netball and basketball. It is played by two teams of eight players with four females and four males in each team. The objective is to throw a ball through a bottomless basket that is mounted on a 3.5 m (11.5 feet) high pole.
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The sport was invented by Dutch schoolteacher Nico Broekhuysen in 1902. In the Netherlands, there are around 580 clubs and over 100,000 people playing korfball. The sport is also very popular in Belgium and Taiwan, and is played in 54 other countries.
Korfball has Dutch origins. In 1902 Nico Broekhuysen, a Dutch school teacher from Amsterdam, was sent to Nääs, a town in Sweden, to follow an educational course about teaching gymnastics to children. This is where he was introduced to the Swedish game ‘ringboll’. In ringboll one could score points by throwing the ball through a ring that was attached to 3 m pole. Men and women played together, and the field was divided into three zones. Players could not leave their zone.
Broekhuysen was inspired and when he returned to Amsterdam he decided to teach his students a similar game. He replaced the ring with a basket (for which the Dutch word is “korf” or “mand”), so it was easier to see if a player had scored or not. Broekhuysen also simplified the rules so children could also understand and play it. Korfball was born. The main idea was the same as ringboll, but it now stood on its own.
The oldest still existing korfball club to never have merged with any other club is a Dutch korfball-club H.K.C. ALO from The Hague, Netherlands. H.K.C. ALO was founded on 1 February 1906.
At first there was considerable controversy about the sport, because the players were of both sexes. Several sports journalists refused to pay even the slightest attention to the new sport. Korfball-players were accused of being immoral. Even the sportswear was criticized, because the women were showing bare knees and ankles. A newspaper even wrote: “Korfball is a monster that spreads its claws to all sides”. Yet korfball was featured as a demonstration sport in the Summer Olympics of 1920 and 1928.
