What is Korfball?
Korfball is the world’s only mixed team sport. As such, it has a unique social dimension. It takes just a few minutes to learn, but for those who take it seriously, a lifetime to perfect.
Like many other team sports, korfball was first developed for children in school. Korfball's originator, Nico Broekhuysen, taught at a school in one of Amsterdam's poorer districts at the turn of the twentieth century. Inspired by ringboll, a passing, catching, shooting game he had seen while visiting Sweden, Nico established korfball in 1903. Unlike all other team sports, Nico's stroke of genius was to find a simple way of including boys and girls equally within the rules of the game. Other sports originated in single sex schooling environments - either as a deliberate mechanism to keep children apart, or as a matter of necessity because none of the 'other' sex were available to play with.
Korfball is a sport played within a rectangular field of play, 40m by 20m. Teams of four female players and four male players try to shoot a ball into a korf (basket). The sport’s main characteristics encompass all-round skills, team play, controlled physical contact and gender co-operation. Teams of eight players divide into two sections – two male, two female in each section. Playing area consists of two large squares joined along the centre line, each square with a ‘korf’ set in one third from the back line. One section starts the game in attack, the other in defence. Sections swap roles after two goals have been scored.
Watch this You Tube clip of an interview with Exeter Korfball Club, featured on ITV West Country News - 27 Feb 2009, which explains more about the game.