Reporting From: USA Team Handball Tryouts

60 athletes try to find another road to the Olympics.

Courtesy USA Team Handball

Is this the next big sport in America?

Troy Peebles is a big dude.

The former USC football player sprints on a parquet floor with a tiny handball in his massive grip, alongside men half his size and boys almost half his age. He looks like a fish out of water. Then again, so does just about everyone else.

Peebles is one of nearly 60 athletes, of various shapes, sizes and athletic backgrounds, gathered at tiny Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, Calif. to tryout for USA Team Handball. This is the fourth such tryout organized by the sport's new governing body in America and has seen the biggest turnout.

After a grassroots campaign to generate interest—at the Olympics, on YouTube, on the web (usateamhandball.org)—USA Team Handball, which hasn't sent a team to the Olympics since 1996, hopes to develop a feeder system in the coming years that will bolster their squad in time for the 2012 Games in London. From here, roughly 10 athletes from each tryout move on to regional clinics, where they will hone their skills in hopes of eventually being asked to join the Olympic squad.

But why the sudden push for a sport almost no one in America grows up playing? Most of the athletes are just looking for a new venue to compete (just like the girls of USA Softball). But we'll let these handball hopefuls explain further:

Kevin Cape — Long Beach State volleyball/track
"Long Beach State is a top-five-in-the-nation school, and I'm not exactly a top-five-in-the-nation kind of athlete. I spent a good three years just sitting and watching. Coming out of high school, I was really good, an all-star; all of a sudden I get to the big leagues and it's 'Who is this guy? Can you bring me a towel kid?' Learning to submit to the ego there helped here. When you're out there for the love of the game, for the spirit of competition, it lets you just play."

Michael Johnson — Oregon State basketball
"I do miss the basketball thing, the whole competing thing. The movements are really similar, the motions. But the biggest struggle to me is the defense. Basketball is hands-off; this is all about using the body. It's almost like football. I have to learn how to be physical again on defense. Basketball is definitely the closest sport to this."

Orentheus Hutcherson — Florida A&M Track
"I kept running track ever since I left college—five or six USA championships, the Olympic trials. But this is going to be my last year running track. I thought, 'Let me try to see if I can play handball.' My advantage is that, since high school, I've been doing strenuous training, elite athlete training, and I think that'll help me out here. Some of these guys are younger, but I've been doing it quite a bit."

Dylan Bakker — Golden West volleyball
"I saw YouTube videos of handball and I was like, 'Dude, that's sick.' It just looked like a fun sport to play, and to me, it didn't seem like too difficult a sport to pick up. An easy concept to grasp. But to be great it takes a lot of work. I was able to grasp it a little bit watching those videos, get a feel for the game."

Troy Peebles — USC Football
"I met a kid out here and he said, 'I wanted to know if I could excel at this.' And I said that you're always going to get that 'If I would have' thing. You don't want to be that person. You want know, 'I tried it.' You never know how good you are until you try it. I don't want to think, 20 years from now, 'I could've been in the Olympics.' I want to know I tried for this. I know I can excel to this level—I've done it in football, I've done it in rugby. I know I can do the same thing here."

Inspired? Another tryout will likely be scheduled in late March or early April in College Station, Tex. Take the trip and you just might end up an Olympian.

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