Spokane is hosting country’s best handball players this weekend. But what is handball, exactly?

It’s soccer! It’s basketball! It’s lacrosse!

Actually, it’s handball, and the best players in North America are competing this weekend at the Podium in Spokane for USA Handball’s Team Open.

“It’s our first time up here in the northwest having a tournament of this level,” said Matthew Collins, marketing director for USA Handball.

No, it’s not wall ball, or four squares, or any of the other school yard games sometimes referred to by that name. Handball has been played in its modern format for more than 100 years, though it remains relatively obscure in the United States.

The game is played a lot like soccer, other than the obvious fact that the ball is manipulated with players’ hands, not their feet. Also unlike soccer, handball is a high scoring game, with teams on offense making a goal more often than not before the other team takes possession.

Two teams of seven players, including a goalie, try to get a ball –similarly designed to a soccer ball, but slightly smaller – across a court into a net similar to a soccer goal, but smaller. Rather than just grip the balls, players apply a sticky resin to their hands to help them maintain contact.

Players dribble and block each other like in basketball, and the team in possession tries to break through a defensive line to launch the ball over, under or around the goalie and into the net. There is also an alternative form, beach handball, played on sand with less player-on-player contact.

Like skeleton racing and futsal, handball is among the official Olympic sports less well known in the states. It’s not unfamiliar with international audiences, however – according to the Brazilian sports outlet Globo Esporte, handball was the second-highest ticketed event at the 2016 Rio Olympics, only behind soccer.

It’s a different story in the United States. USA Team Handball, the official governing body for the sport in this country, calls it “the best sport you probably didn’t know existed.”

That obscurity comes with obvious drawbacks, with only a few dozen official teams across the country, said Collins, who is one of only two employees of USA Team Handball. Without a well-developed fanbase, professional athletes in the sport aren’t going to be making the millions that might be found in football, basketball, baseball or soccer, he added.

The weekend tournament was meant to include a Junior Nationals, but not enough qualifying teams were able to attend, Collins said. Instead, youth teams are playing in the adult open.

American teams also tend to underperform on the world stage. Though the game has been a part of the Olympics for decades, the last time a U.S. team qualified was in 1996, when the team automatically qualified because this country hosted that year, Collins said.

But the smallness of the community also means it tends to be incredibly tight knit, Collins added. Of the dues-paying teams registered with USA Team Handball, around 80% will be competing in Spokane.

There are also unusual opportunities in developing a relatively unknown sport.

“It’s challenging, but exciting,” Collins said.

“We don’t usually like to use the ‘p-word’ in the office, but Pickleball is obviously a big example,” he added with a grin. “Somehow, they figured it out, so we’re trying to, not emulate, but see, what worked for them? What wouldn’t work for our demographic?”

And because the field is relatively undeveloped, there are also opportunities for athletes who may not have spent their whole lives dedicated to the sport, but still perform at a top level nationally, Collins said.

“If I tried to start playing baseball right now, and I try to join an adult baseball league or the NBA, it would be impossible, I would not do well,” he said.

“I started playing indoor handball, and within a few weeks, I was playing with guys who had international handball experience,” he added. “I wasn’t the best, definitely. But did I look out of place? No.”

USA Team Handball will be holding another U.S. Open in Spokane next year, though not on the same weekend as Bloomsday, Collins chuckled. By then, he hopes that this year’s tournament will have generated enough interest that they’re joined by a newly minted Spokane club.

The Podium was an ideal location, despite being far removed from any of the established teams, Collins said, because the four courts help to keep the day’s tournaments from running well into the evening and because the arena doesn’t have the striping and markings of a half-dozen other sports distracting players.

There are 25 teams playing this weekend, often eight at a time on the Podium’s four courts. They come from across the country, mostly from the east coast, but also from Chicago, California and elsewhere. Three Canadian teams are also taking part.

“We like to invite the best competition, and feel that it improves our clubs as well as a whole region, including Canada, the U.S. and Mexico,” Collins said.

Some teams aren’t from a particular region, but consist of members from across the country.

On Friday afternoon, one such team, Rogue Women, played their first match of the weekend against one of Quebec’s women’s teams. The two teams had noticeably different playing styles, with Quebec playing more defensively and keeping more players guarding their goal, while Rogue rushed forward to intercept the other team’s players.

Quebec benefited from a deeper roster: while only seven people play on each team at a time, another 11 can be on the bench ready to swap out. But Rogue had only 12 players to rotate, while Quebec had 15, an additional three players to stay fresh and relieve their tired teammates.

While 70% of Rogue’s scores came from its highest scoring players, nearly half of Quebec’s came from players making just one or two goals in the match. The aggressive athleticism of Rogue’s players helped make up for an early deficit, but Quebec’s well-oiled coordination steadily prevailed.

Which makes sense, said Rogue’s North Carolina-based Kathleen Darling, who has been competing for nearly two decades and singlehandedly scored 26% of the team’s goals in the match against Quebec.

“We live about as far apart as you can get, so we don’t get to practice together very much,” Darling said. “The first game is always kind of your practice.”

A lot of the players used to live in the same city, said Elizabeth Harnett, the team’s fourth-highest scorer, and many of them play on the women’s national team, which has helped keep Rogue together.

“We’ve been together a little bit here and there, as the women’s national team starts to try to build itself back up (after the COVID-19 pandemic),” Darling said.

Darling found herself playing handball through “dumb luck,” she said, after coaching basketball in New York.

“A friend of my head coach was saying, wouldn’t it be hilarious if we tried out for the women’s national team in this sport nobody’s knows how to play?” she said. “Eighteen years later, I’m still playing.”