A club built from scratch in California is about to share a court with some of the most decorated names in world handball. LA Handball Club has qualified for the IHF Men's Club World Championship for the first time in history this summer, after winning the North American and Caribbean Championship, becoming the fourth club from the United States to reach this competition.

The road behind them has been paved by three other American sides. New York City Team Handball Club opened the American chapter of this story in 2019, losing all three of their matches. San Francisco CalHeat carried the flag twice, finishing tenth in 2021 without a win and returning in 2023 to post a single victory from four matches to end up tenth again. 

And, more recently, California Eagles picked up the mantle in 2024 and 2025, finishing ninth and then eighth, the second campaign also yielding one win, 31:25, against Australian side Sydney Uni HC. 

LA Handball Club now steps into that lineage as continental champions, and have some big names on the bench, ready to pour knowledge in their players and raise the level.

At the centre of the club's rebuild is Lewis Howes, its president and a player on the roster, a man better known to millions outside the sport as a podcaster and author than as a handball athlete. ​​​​​​

 

Howes took over the club last yearand set about reconstructing it from the ground up, a process he describes without pretending it was smooth. 

"We faced a lot of challenges during the year leading into the National Championships and into the North American Championships with a lot of resistance and critics in our own country. In order to do something that had never been done for our club we needed to reimagine a bigger vision for what was possible for us all,” Howes says before Los Angeles Handball Club makes their debut on the big stage.

That vision has had to contend with a structural reality: handball in the United States remains an amateur pursuit, run largely on the volunteer hours of players and club managers who compete for a sliver of the country's sporting attention. 

"Most of handball in USA is struggling. It's an amateur sport so it takes more time, energy and resources for players and club managers to build something meaningful," says Howes, in a candid manner.

 

For this edition of the event, Los Angeles Handball Club managed to provide a coup in bringing together two brilliant minds. One is Daniel Gordo, a Spanish coach whose résumé stretches from the youth ranks of Ademar León, where he later took charge of the senior team, through spells in the Faroe Islands with Kyndil Tórshavn and at Club Balonmano Nava. 

Gordo's coaching path has since carried him to Brazil, to Belarusian side Meshkov Brest, to Egyptian powerhouse Al Ahly SC, and to a stint as the Türkiye national team coach, before a return to Ademar León and now to Los Angeles. 

Alongside him, as a co-coach, sits Morten Olsen, the mastermind behind the continental win, and a player whose own playing career needs little introduction in handball circles: an Olympic champion with Denmark in Rio in 2016, a silver medallist in Tokyo, and a two-time world champion in 2019 and 2021, launching Denmark’s dynasty, who continued in 2023 and 2025. 

Between a coach who has worked across five countries and a player-turned-mentor with a Danish trophy cabinet, LA Handball Club has assembled a technical staff with a depth of experience rarely seen at a debutant club.

 

Howes is, however, careful not to let ambition outrun the club's current reality. Several of the team's strongest players were unavailable for the North American Championship itself, a reminder that most of this roster still balances handball against full-time jobs, training in whatever hours remain. 

"It has been a challenge in getting here," he acknowledges, "but our goal is to play hard to the end of every game with our best effort in every moment." 

There are several American players in the squad, such as Ebiye Udo-Udoma, more known as the Handball Ninja in beach handball circles, and Zuwed Akuro, who featured for the Eagles in the previous edition of the IHF Men’s Club World Championship.

Egyptians Togba Aboubacar and Youssef Elsayed also made the cut, as well as goalkeeper Frank Krone Mikkelsen, who played for GOG, HOJ Elite or TT Holstebro over the past decade.

 

But the ambition is there and Howes circles the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games as a perfect example why handball can become popular in the United States of America.

With the Olympic Games now less than two years away and the host nation guaranteed a place in the handball tournament, LA Handball Club aims to position itself as a pipeline for that roster rather than a one-off qualifier. 

Howes wants the club's Club World Championship appearance to do double duty: showcase the team on its own merits, and introduce a sport still unfamiliar to most Americans to an audience he has spent years building elsewhere. 

"I often talk about my personal handball journey to my audience of nearly 30 million followers on my social media platforms, as handball is unknown by most Americans," he says. "When you tell someone you play handball they always think it's a different sport." 

He traces his own path back to watching the sport for the first time at the Beijing 2008 Olympics, a moment he says rerouted his life from Ohio to New York, then Spain, then the national team. It is that same discovery he hopes to hand on to a new audience through this tournament.

The culture that the Los Angeles Handball Club wants to build around the talent, starts with a mindset built on gratitude, on setting standards on and off the court, and on the relationships formed along the way. 

"Life is about making beautiful memories with people that inspire you and lift you up,. And I'm so grateful to get to experience these moments at the Club World Championships together, as a team," says Howes.

Whether this is a beginning of a beautiful friendship – as the famous movie Casablanca coined the phrase almost a century ago – it is still to be seen. But the ambition is there and the LA HC is just getting started.