Worldwide interest in England Handball webinars

02 Jun. 2020

Worldwide interest in England Handball webinars

After launching early last month, the England Handball Association (EHA) has now completed 15 coach development webinar sessions, continuing the organisation’s commitment to individuals’ ‘Continuing Professional Development’ (CPD).

Friday, Vera Lopes (Technical Director for Women's Handball, Portuguese Handball Federation), presented ‘Women's Handball - Overview and Analysis’, as the eight-week English-language series came to an end.

Up to 160 people were able to attend each webinar live, with many more able to access a recording immediately after as 68 different nationalities registered for a wide variety of topics, spread over a number of presentations which all featured question and answer sessions at the end.

It came as no surprise that they were so well attended as a number of high-profile names from across the handball world participated, most notably, Portugal men’s national team head coach Paulo Pereira, THW Kiel and Germany men’s national team goalkeeping coach, and Swedish goalkeeping legend, Mattias Andersson, Angola’s women’s national team assistant coach Danilo Gagliardi and many more, including a number of current and former Great Britain and England coaches.

Set up by EHA National Performance Manager and Olympian Bobby White, alongside EHA Partnership Manager and GB Men’s Coach Ricardo Vasconcelos, and targeting coaches based in England initially, the response after launch was “overwhelming” as registrations came in from all six continents almost immediately – and unexpectedly.

However, White and Vasconcelos quickly realised even though they were hitting a global audience, they had nothing to worry about as the experienced handball guests imparted their knowledge.

“We were delighted to have such an amazing group of practitioners willing to share their expertise,” said White to IHF.info. “And they didn’t fail to captivate and engage our audience; either through our guest speakers from the world of handball delivering their tactical-themed sessions which ran through a variety of topics or our guest speakers and coaches from other sports who were able to give insights from outside of handball into coaching other methods and trends.”

Those tactical themed sessions proved the most popular out of the whole series of webinars, with themes including Defensive Principles & Tactics, Attacking Principles, including 7v6, Coaching Methodologies, Performance Analysis and Junior & Schools Handball amongst others.

“I had a positive impression when I previously worked with England Handball so when I was asked, I was happy to help with this project – and I always like to talk about goalkeeping,” said goalkeeper Andersson, who also attended a number of webinars as well as presenting one. 

“I also really enjoyed the different topics that were on offer, for example, Mark Hawkins (GB Olympian and IK Vag's Head Coach – Norway) presented on performance analysis and, like always, provided some very interesting thoughts about statistics, while the decision-making webinar had some great information.”

White confirmed to IHF.info, that due to the large success and the positive feedback of this initial series of webinars, a new series of webinars is set to be announced very soon as the EHA aims to continue providing a platform for coaches all around the world, with a focus on England, to learn from expert speakers and interact with the global handball community.

Watch all webinars on EHAtv/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheEHATV/videos

For further information on the England Handball Association, visit their website at www.englandhandball.com.

PHOTOS: England Handball Association