Handball stars: Multisport as a draw for club sports

Maren Aardahl, who has won the Olympics, World Cup and European Championship with the Norwegian national handball team, is visiting Qaqortoq these days.

Around 70 children are participating in the sports club K-33’s sports camp in Qaqortoq these days.

The hope of the sports camp is to arouse children and young people’s interest in various sports.

Former national team player for Greenland in handball and elite coach in Denmark Jakob Larsen and Norwegian national team star Maren Aardahl are participating in the camp as instructors.

You can choose football on the football field or handball a few hundred meters away in the sports hall. Two options have been set because it can be difficult to get enough registrations if you can only choose one sport. But there may also be an ulterior motive behind the concept.

– It may be a hidden agenda for me that those who play football should go in and start playing handball, and those who play handball go out and play football, says Jakob Larsen to KNR.

Across sports

Football is, as in the rest of the world, the biggest sport in Greenland. The combination of both handball and football on the program already seems to have sparked interest across the two sports, with football boys taking the ball with their hands.

– Yesterday after training I saw them running around the sports hall playing handball and organizing a handball match. And that makes my handball heart very happy, because organizing handball on your own is difficult. It almost always ends up being football, says Jakob Larsen.

The overall goal of K-33’s sports camp is to get children and young people involved in club sports. Many children are just starting to show an interest in sports.

Handball with football socks

This situation is recognized by Norwegian Maren Aardahl, who plays for Odense handball, which won silver in the Champions League a little over a month ago.

– For me, and I think for the children too, it’s about being with friends and playing with the ball, says Maren Aardahl to KNR.

– I can see among the participants that there is a large group of friends. And that’s how it all starts. They can continue playing handball for years to come because they are with their friends. And I can also see football boys have started running around the handball field with football socks on. So we hope that these boys will continue to enter the hall after being with us at sports camp, says Maren Aardahl.

As mentioned, she is coming off a tough season, where she won the Danish championship with Odense and silver in Europe’s biggest club tournament, the Champions League.

The experience of coming to South Greenland is also a good contrast to life as a professional player, where you get away from flash lights and TV cameras and instead land in scenic surroundings.

– Even though I’m Norwegian and used to nature, it’s different here, and I also love training children, says Maren Aardahl, who originally comes from Trondheim. So she won’t hesitate to take up the offer if there’s a new invitation to come to Greenland.