Got Korf

Like every Tuesday evening I was at Korfball practise tonight. I made a promise to myself to talk as little about my real life as possible as, to be honest, I lead a pretty boring life. I've gone back on this promise as every time I mention this sport no one has a clue what I'm on about. All the guys call it netball and the girls call it basketball. Well it's neither, and I hope to clear that up now.

Korfball is a Dutch game played on a court the same size as a basketball court and even has similar boundries. Each team has two divisions made of 4 players, 2 males and 2 females in each division. Each division gets a half of a court. One of the divisions defends the oppisition while the other division attacks. That's the basics down so I'll move onto the dynamics.

When you are attacking your goal is to score in the basket. The basket is about 3 metres high and looks like a bottomless wicker basket but made of yellow plastic. You pass the ball between each other until someone shoots and then someone 'collects' the ball and feeds it out to continue the attack. When attacking, and defending, you can't run with the ball. You can move with the ball but only two steps. The way around this is to cheat and jump as you catch meaning you are moving without making steps :P

The defender has a much simpler job which mainly involves stop the opposition from scoring and then passing it back to the attackers. It is a non-contact sport and you can't touch the ball when the opposition is holding. To remove height advantage you can 'defend' the shooter by standing a stride away from them and holding your hand up to block the path of the ball. The rest of it becomes very obvious.

The only other thing of note is the way of shooting in that you can shoot from a distance in a way similar to basketball or netball or you can do a running in shot which is an underarm shot. When you are running very close to the basket you do an underarm throw diretly up, extending you arms as far as possible and the inertia from your movement helps the ball into the goal. Also, every 2 goals scored, combined, involves switching ends so you become the attackers/defenders.

I hope you get Korfball now :D Nothing else really happened to me today. Just spoke to people on MSN and thought of an ingenious way to get to see My Boody Valentine 3D. I've also randomly gud out 'Tomb of the Mutilated' by Canibal Corpse mainly because I saw the album art.

Ciao

xox