U.S. Women Chase Olympic Handball After Social Call (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: They asked us right at the beginning who has played the handball before and nobody raised their hands. These women signed up to try out for the U.S. Olympic handball team after seeing a call out on social media.

[00:00:12] Speaker 2: If you're a woman in the U.S. who wants to learn how to play handball you could be an Olympian by 2028. I saw it a day and a half before the tryout. By chance a girl we were like walking in at the same time she's like girl you here for you know the handball tryout? I was like yeah. She's like have you ever played before? I'm like no and she's like okay me neither.

[00:00:29] Speaker 1: All three women were former athletes two of them being sisters but none of them had played handball before. We were trying to watch videos of how to play handball so that's really what we were going off of. CEO Michael King says the tryouts were held to identify athletes with potential but ultimately 14 players will make the roster with a few alternates.

[00:00:48] Speaker 3: The list of individuals that started playing handball before they you know were 20, 24, 28 years old is a lot longer than the list of Olympians we've had that you know were introduced to it in their younger years.

[00:00:59] Speaker 2: I come from rugby so it wasn't too out of the mental bandwidth for me to understand that if you're an athlete you can train to a specific sport.