Worldwide Korfball Match on the International Youth Korfball Day

This year the Hungarian Korfball Association decided (besides to another project) to organize a Worldwide Korfball Match on 15 June. The idea that originally came from Miklós Turchányi was simple: everybody could participate by organizing some kind of a korfball contest/match, where the teams were called Korfs and Balls. We collected the results on a special Sportwavez.com website dedicated to the event, where participants could easily register and upload their scores. Based on these scores, the website calculated the overall worldwide score in real time.

After an intensive campaign that ran for 3 weeks mostly on Facebook, 20 countries (and 97 individuals on Facebook) joined the event: in alphabetic order, they were Australia, Brazil, Belarus, Catalunya, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong China, Hungary, Nepal, Netherlands, Romania, Scotland, Slovakia, Sweden, Taiwan, UK, USA, Zambia, Zimbabwe. It is one third of all members of the International Korfball Federation, and we had participants from all the continents (except from Antarctica). We were happy to see the results from North- and South America, and never before there were so many korfball activities in Africa.

The final result was 899 : 827 for the Balls team(s), which means 1726 goals scored worldwide.

The top scoring countries were:

Catalunya: 413 goals

Hungary: 309 goals

Germany: 175 goals

Taiwan: 166 goals

Sweden: 113 goals

Nepal: 105 goals

Slovakia: 96 goals

Zambia: 73 goals

Hong-Kong China: 56 goals

Romania: 48 goals

Brazil: 41 goals

Ghana: 33 goals

Greece: 26 goals

The Netherlands: 20 goals

UK: 19 goals

USA: 19 goals

Australia: 14 goals

We were happy to see a very enthusiastic participation from smaller korfball countries, while the bigger ones showed less interest in this project. It shows that such events can be used as promotion events in the developing korfball countries.

We organized this event with a bottom-up approach, meaning that we didn’t ask countries to participate, but we provided an easy-to use and fun environment where all interested individuals, clubs and national federations could participate. I think it is a method to be utilized also in the future: we have to provide a framework that the countries can fill with their own activities. It means flexibility from the organizers’ side, and more emphasis on activities that the korfball countries would really like to be involved in.

Finally, something about the technical background of the event:

The website on Sportwavez.com (http://sportwavez.com/seasons/worldwide-korfball-worldwide-korfball-match) provided an easy-to use online tool to post all results in real time, with a professional look, tailored to the event.

The Facebook event: (http://www.facebook.com/events/563413473709807) was the fastest and most effective way to create a campaign among korfballers around the world.

Bandor Nagy