{"id":158940599,"date":"2012-09-08T15:16:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-08T15:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/squashword.com\/handball"},"modified":"2012-09-08T15:16:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-08T15:16:00","slug":"handball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/?p=158940599","title":{"rendered":"Handball"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Many of you probably saw the piece in the sports pages of Sunday <em>Times<\/em> this past weekend on the U.S. handball team: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/09\/02\/sports\/unified-in-america-by-international-sport.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all\">http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/09\/02\/sports\/unified-in-america-by-international-&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>There used to be two sports I used when discussing squash and the Olympics: table tennis and badminton. Now I get to add handball. All three are in the Games and yet are miniscule, barely visible stars in the American sporting firmament. The <em>Times<\/em> reported that only eight hundred people play competitive handball in the U.S. Eight hundred. And this is a sport that has been in the Olympic Games since 1972. Forty years and less than a thousand adherents.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For comparison, USATT has about ten thousand members (joined Olympics in 1988) and USA Badminton has less than half that (joined in 1992). Squash&#8217;s Mike Barnett can give specific numbers, since his Railstation software manages the badminton membership system.<\/p>\n<p>There is no doubt that if squash got into the Olympics, it would be a good thing with many obvious and not-so-obvious benefits. But for a long time some have acted like the Olympics are a sure-fire, automatic golden goose. It is not so simple, as any handball pivot will tell you.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of you probably saw the piece in the sports pages of Sunday Times this past weekend on the U.S. handball team: http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/09\/02\/sports\/unified-in-america-by-international-&#8230; There used to be two sports I used when discussing&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158940599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158940599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=158940599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158940599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=158940599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=158940599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=158940599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}