Since we already presented Italian and Polish teams, we believe it would be fair to present some local team now 🙂 Below you may read how the most numerous club (6 registered teams!) on this year’s Jarun Cup – BHC Sesvete – have developed within 5 years of existence:
Tell us few words about your club, how long does it exist, how many members does it have etc.
As a club we started to play beach handball in 2011, whilst officially under the name BHC Sesvete we’ve been playing from 2012. As majority of teams, we trained indoor handball together and the day we stood on the sand we fell in love with the beach handball immediately.
During five years we’ve developed from the team with which everybody can easily win to the one that took part in EBT Finals in 2016 and the 3rd team of last season’s EBT ranking. The club has about 30 members – we have men’s senior and junior teams, and from last year we have women’s senior team as well. We are very happy to be the biggest „delegation“ on this year’s Jarun Cup.
How did you manage to gain an interest in beach handball among youngsters?
This is third season of our juniors team, which btw. won Jarun Cup 2016 in their category, and last year we managed to collect the team of boys born in 2004. These boys are indoor handballers who play for our local clubs MRK Sesvete and RK Dubrava. I have to admit that these boys can’t wait to start the season. Last year they took part in Jarun Cup and then Zagreb Open, where they were the best team, and were totally thrilled with that.
Do all of you play indoor handball as well or you just focused on beach handball only?
About half of our team is still active indoor players, the rest are already pensioners 🙂 Majority of the team are MRK Sesvete players who still play for the club, but we have also few guys from RK Dubrava and RK Polet. Playing indoor handball helps us to stay fit until May when beach handball season starts, even though until about half of May it’s quite complicated period when we play both indoor and beach handball.
How do you prepare for the season?
Besides regular team meetings during whole year, we start to train in April when the temperature start to go up, so that we prepare well for the Jarun Cup and the whole season.
What are your goals for the 2017 season?
Every season we have developed – when speaking about the results, last year we won Zagreb Open in dramatic finals against Detono and silver medal on Croatian Championships. We hope that the 2017 season will be even better and that we will fight for 1st place in Croatian Championships. We want to achieve the best possible place on Jarun Cup – last time we were 3rd, so we hope to play the finals this year.