A general view of the GAA National Handball Centre.
By Cian O’Connell
This weekend’s Euro Elite 1Wall tournament at the National Handball Centre at Croke Park is generating plenty of interest.
Competitors from nine different countries including Ireland’s Catríona Casey and Conor McElduff will be involved.
David Britton, Head of GAA Handball, is excited that the Dublin venue will host the tournament. “It is fantastic, we have 12 of the world's elite one wall handballers coming into Dublin for the Saturday and Sunday event,” he says.
“We are delighted with that. It is featuring two Irish athletes, Catríona Casey will be representing the female handballers, and Conor McElduff will be representing the Irish male handballers. They will get a chance to go up against some world class competitors from nine different countries.”
Catríona Casey will be competing at Croke Park this weekend.
Handball club members throughout the country have been afforded an opportunity to apply for tickets. “There has been good interest, we are limited from a capacity perspective as to how many people we can have in there,” Britton says.
“You have limited numbers, what we wanted to was to make it first and foremost available to the handball community and our clubs. We have given them first refusal to tickets on the Saturday. So we have contacted all of our clubs, we have asked them to submit expression of interest documents, allowing them to bring anything up to five members from their club for free to Saturday's event.
“We have done something similar for the Sunday, we have left it for the provincial councils and county boards to select two reps. We also have invited people from the GAA and external funders, and various other people we think that it would be a good idea to have them there on the day.
“We want to use this event as an opportunity to highlight the sport from an international perspective. It might be lost on some people, even within the sport, the fact that there is huge amount of work being conducted throughout the world really.”
Conor McElduff is competing at the weekend.
Covid restrictions significantly impacted indoor sports so Britton believes that handball can make progress with competitions such as the Euro Elite 1Wall tournament.
“It is a fantastic platform, it is a fantastic launch pad,” he says. We are more or less in partnership with Europe 1 Wall, and Dan Grant, UK's wall ball chairman, we are running this in partnership with them.
“It is their event, we are the venue facilitator and we have provided a huge amount of support in the background with logistics. It is a combined effort. It is to bring the international side of this to the forefront, to highlight it to the handball community and to the wider community in the GAA as a whole, that the potential is there to grow this sport internationally in the future.
“I was at a front wall ball event last month in Biarittz, 32 different countries were represented at it. So there is a huge amount of growth going on at an international level. One of our strategic goals in our strategic plan is to explore the potential to grow the sport internationally. This is our first venture that.”