Historical transition of athlete development in U-10 German handball:

Focus on journal articles (1988-2018) published by the German Handball Federation

Abstract

　The aim of this study was to clarify the historical transition of U-10 athlete development in German handball. We performed a text mining analysis of articles on U-10 athlete development in the monthly journal “handballtraining” (1988-2018) and the quarterly journal “handballtraining JUNIOR” (2012-2018) published by the German Handball Federation. The historical transition of U-10 athlete development was divided into 5-year periods from 1988.
　The main results were as follows. For the first 5 years, the need for “children’s handball” was encouraged by presenting ideas for systematic and long-term development of game sense, and to recommend the use of balls suitable for children. The next central theme was encouraging children to learn offensive defenses by playing games and developing individual attack skills. Thereafter, a long-term athlete development system was established, and a mandatory game format was implemented. A recent central theme was proposed for development of individual attack skills through practices children could enjoy.
　It was inferred that the turning point of U-10 athlete development occurred in 2003 when the offensive defense became obligatory in games. One of the reasons for the obligatory adoption of defense formation may have been that the content and method of the training activities were not changed by coaches even when they provided seminars and practice drills to help realize the child-specific concept of handball.
　We conclude that for Japan, it is an urgent issue to work on a new U-10 format for athlete development in handball, providing a guiding philosophy for the development and training of players. In order to accomplish this, it might be advisable to change the game format, as was done in Germany, or to change the education of coaches, which might have been ineffective in Germany. These results suggest the need to develop a new policy and implement the necessary changes using one of the aforementioned methods.