Hope students
learn korfball
International game called "Dutch-style basketball"
By LEE LAMBERTS
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Travis Spaman was a good basketball player during his four years at Hope College.
As a freshman, he sank the game-winning basket in an NCAA Division III tournament game at St. Norbert's College in suburban Green Bay. For his career, he scored nearly 800 points and produced 331 rebounds.
Spaman also was a member of a couple of Hope teams that won Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association championships.
Then, he was introduced to korfball.
Korfball is an international game, "something like basketball," Spaman said, but with some drastic differences.
One of those is the basket. Instead of hanging from the ceiling 10 feet above the playing surface, a plastic korfball basket is attached to a vertical pole 111Ž2 feet above the floor.
"It's a fun game," Spaman said, "but for the first two weeks, I think, every shot I took was about a foot-and-a-half short."
That's one of the things that makes korfball fun, said Karla Wolters, a Hope College professor and coach who taught the first korfball class at the school.
And challenging.
"It's quite a bit like basketball, yet it's not," said Wolters, who attended a clinic on the game in the Netherlands last month. "The court is quite a bit bigger than a basketball court, the baskets are several feet from the end line ... and there are no backboards so it really becomes a challenge. The ball is smaller, too, approximately the size of a soccer ball."
Wolters said she was first introduced to korfball about 10 years ago.
"I had a friend in Maine who had a cousin who was a korfball player at Oral Roberts University and that's when I saw it played for the first time," she said. "Then, last summer, the president of the International Korfball Federation (established in 1933) was in the United States and I met her. We really hit it off and they encouraged me to start teaching korfball here at Hope."
Wolters got permission to teach a class in korfball and in her first session this past school year, she had 19 students sign up.
Including Spaman.
"I signed up blind; I didn't know what to expect," Spaman said. "I wanted to take a fun type of activity class and I had room for it and it turned out to be a lot of fun.
"Being a basketball player and having a rim over 11 feet high with no backboard was a huge adjustment. We had a lot of athletes in the class, but once we got the hang of (the game), it was a lot of fun."
Wolters said she expected those who played korfball would enjoy it partly because each team consists of an equal number of men and women on the court at the same time.
There are eight players on the court at a time with four players in each half-court zone -- two men and two women. Offensively, dribbling is not allowed to advance the ball, but a player may bounce the ball to maintain control. Defensively, men may only guard men and women may only guard women.
Once a team makes two baskets, the players switch zones and move from offense to defense, and vice versa.
Wolters said one of the more difficult concepts to master was the absence of a backboard, plus a rim made of a synthetic plastic instead of metal.
"There are no so-called friendly rims," she said. "It's very up-tempo and very aerobic. It's played four-on-four, so you are always in motion. Plus, korfball is the only sport where it is played co-ed at the highest level."
Wolters said that because of the positioning of the baskets -- go to www.korfball.org for pictures and more information -- shots often are taken from unexpected places, even beyond the half-court line.
"It's basketball," Wolters said, "but it's basketball Dutch style."
Contact Lee Lamberts at alan.babbitt@hollandsentinel.com or (616) 546-4271.