This study aimed to clarify the philosophy of children’s handball coaches in Japan and Germany in terms of individual player development, content and methods of training, and game performance. In addition, we compared player development and enhancement between top children’s handball teams from Japan (“Hokuden”: coach, Mr. Tanaka) and Germany (“Leipzig”: coach, Mr. Andrä) by interviewing the coaches and analyzing the teams’ game performances.
　The main results were as follows: 1) While the philosophy of “individual player development” was to let young players acquire basic skills in handball for both Hokuden and Leipzig, differences were found between Mr. Tanaka’s and Mr. Andrä’s approaches, in that mastering skills was important for Mr. Tanaka, whereas gaining a variety of experiences was important for Mr. Andrä. 2) No significant differences were found in the effectiveness of positional attacks (total goals divided by the total number of attacks in a match), effectiveness of shots (total goals divided by the total number of shots in a match), and percentage of technical errors (total technical errors divided by the total number of attacks in a match), suggesting that there are no characteristic outcomes, even though they play under different rules. 3) In Hokuden, individual roles were divided according to each phase of organized attack and defense, and each player tried to fulfill a role as a part the team, whereas in Leipzig, players tried to solve issues in order to score a goal through the entire phase of organized attack and defense by themselves, suggesting that both coaches focused on “individual player development” but with different target images.

抄録全体を表示

　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.

抄録全体を表示