The 2019 Australia Handball Club Championship
will be played from June 6 to 9 at Coomera Indoor Sports Centre on the Gold
Coast – home of the 2018 Commonwealth Games. The event will see eight men’s
teams and three women’s sides vying for the titles.
The main question at what is the biggest
club handball event in the continent of Oceania will be: can perennial men’s
title holders Sydney University Handball Club finally be dethroned, or will
they take their eighth trophy in the competition?
“It’s always a huge challenge going up
against Sydney Uni, with their European experience, and they deserve to be
favourites,” says University of Queensland (UQ) captain Tomas Atchison, whose
club claimed the bronze medal in 2018, after being defeated by Sydney in the
semi-final. “However, I feel with our team this year we have an excellent
chance of coming out on top against them.”
Sydney Uni will compete from preliminary Group
B. The seven-time trophy winners will take on the University of Western
Australia (UWA), St Kilda and UQ’s number two side.
The runners-up for the past two years in
the men’s competition, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), will play
from Group A. There they will meet UQ 1, South Australia, and the University of
New South Wales (UNSW).
“The past 12 months have seen our Australian
boys progress massively, with a number of our squad gaining international
experience with both the junior and senior Australian men’s team,” says
Atchison of UQ’s squad. “We’ve also welcomed a number of experienced European
players, who have added to our club, which gives us our best team to date.”
After the group stage in the men’s
tournament on Thursday and Friday, the semi-finals will take place on Saturday.
The placement round will also begin on Saturday, before the medal round and
last placement matches on the final day of competition.
The women’s tournament will feature a
series of round-robin clashes before the top two sides contest the final on
Sunday. The teams participating in the women’s event are Melbourne Handball
Club, UTS and UQ.
After several years of teams from across
Oceania participating, including clubs from New Caledonia and New Zealand, this
year the competition features only Australian sides.
Photo: Handball VIC