“There are many players who are good at passing the ball and shooting, but they are not good players,
but there is no good player who does not know how to do it well.”

Kalina Kažić is a girl gifted enough to play right wing in her category in RK “Budućnost” and the national team of Montenegro.

Ana Papić is a girl gifted enough to play as center back in her category in RK “Lokomotiva” and the Croatian national team.

So, both are gifted enough to play in the best club and national team in the country where they live.

In addition to talent, they share poor biomechanics of the ball-throwing movement, i.e. both push the ball when passing or shooting.

The difference is that Kalina is 12 years old and Ana is 17.

Kalina

I met Kalina at the JR4 camp and the process of getting rid of the movement of pushing the ball and learning how to throw the ball lasted 10 days, during which she performed corrective exercises for about half an hour to an hour a day.

For the first few days, the “old movement” was dominant and the acquisition of the movement in the exercise with sneakers was difficult, but when she “became aware of the movement” learning accelerated in the second part of the camp.

The video showing the learning process is a cross-section of the basic steps she went through.

Ana

Ana is a girl who played handball for about 10 years before the beginning of the “reprogramming” of pushing the ball into the pass by throwing the ball and shooting the “whip” shot.

Already in the first training, she mastered how to “spin the sneakers” and became aware of the biomechanics of passing the ball by throwing, however, the process of reprogramming the passing movement and shooting with a “whip” kick instead of pushing the ball in the game lasted about 4 months.

Individual work was carried out twice a week for 2 hours and in addition to reprogramming the biomechanics of movement, an individual physical preparation program was carried out, the goals of which were:
1. shoulder mobility (before starting work. there was reduced internal rotation of the shoulder) and thoracic mobility

2. strength (primarily triceps muscle) and posterior muscle chain (hip, spine, scapula, shoulder, elbow)

The video showing the learning is a cross-section of the basic steps she went through in those 4 months.

CONCLUSION

Even gifted children sometimes need coaching help in learning the simplest handball elements such as passing the ball and shooting.

It is extremely important to teach children how to pass the ball and shoot without pushing the ball, because a wrongly learned and automated movement is much more difficult to correct, and the longer the player repeats it, the more complex and painstaking the reprogramming process becomes.

It is especially difficult for some players to accept the fact that they do not know such a banal thing, and the process of becoming aware and accepting the need for new learning can be emotionally very hard.

I thank Jovanka Radičević and Kalina’s parents for the permission to use the videos, the credit for the exercise with the tennis shoe goes to Krešimir Pažin, and for the mobility and strength exercises to Krešimir Šoš.