Champittet Summer Camp Korfball activites!!

During the past month of July, we were very pleased to organize some korfball activities for the children attending the Champittet Summer Camp. There were boys and girls from all around the world - Turkey, Italy, Jordan, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, Greece and many other countries! The summer camp took place during the whole month of July; some children stayed there for only one week, while others came for two or three weeks or even one month. They were all between 11 and 16 years old, which we thought were good ages to work with.

We managed to organize a one-hour korfball practice session per week, during the first three weeks of the camp, so a total of three korfball introduction sessions. We did the activities outdoors since the weather was very nice. When we arrived, we were surprised to hear that nobody knew what korfball was and they had never heard about it, not even the supervisors. Therefore, we started with a 15-minute introduction to the sport, explaining a bit about the origins and the rules of korfball and about the particularities of this mixed gender team sport. All the children seemed very interested and curious about korfball and asked many questions related to this new sport.

Korfball is the only mixed gender team sport in the world!

Have you ever heard anything about korfball?

After that, we just gave the children six balls and allowed them to shoot freely from wherever they wanted, just to get them used to the sport. Then we began with some simple shooting exercises to get them all started. Since it was a group of around 16 children, very suitable for the type of activities we wanted to set up and for the matches at the end of the session, we divided them into two groups of eight, trying to have four boys and four girls in each group. We did a shooting practice game as a competition to motivate them even more to score. It was a bit of a mess at the beginning, because one person had to stay under the korf to take the rebound and pass it to the next, and the person who had shot had to stay to pick up the next rebound, so it was a bit confusing for them at first. But as they say, practice makes perfect, so after having done this exercise a few times they got better at it. 

After this little game we realized we were running out of time, so we proceeded with the matches at the end of the session. We divided the 16 children into four teams of four, trying to have two boys and two girls in each team, although this was difficult to achieve. While two teams were playing a match, the other two stayed on the other side of the court playing a game we really like, which is very helpful for children to learn the korfball rules: Two players start passing the ball between each other within a limited space, of course without running with the ball in their hands and without bouncing the ball. The rest of the players have to run around and escape from the two people with the ball, whose objective is to catch one of the running players and touch him/her with the ball (without throwing the ball at them). The "caught" players then have to join the "passing" players, so each time there are more and more players trying to catch the rest. 

Sometimes we did another game, called "the 10 passes". It starts with two teams, and the players in one team start passing the ball between each other (applying the korfball rules) until they manage to do 10 passes. The players in the opposite team have to try and intercept and steal the ball from the rival team and do the 10 passes themselves. Each 10 passes within a team count as one point, and the game continues so on.

Who's going to take the rebound?

The other two sessions were pretty much the same, because every week there were new children who had not been there the past sessions, and so we had to explain what korfball was all over again, trying to make the children who had experienced the past practices explain the rules themselves. Sometimes it was really hard to interact with the children because the activities took place in the evening during their free time and they were often tired and not willing to do anything so they started talking to each other. It was difficult to talk to them when they were not paying attention or making a lot of noise, but we could not be too strict with them because, after all, it was a summer camp where the children came to have fun, not a school lesson. 

If we had spare time at the end, we played one of our favourite games, CAOS, which the children really enjoyed. 

We had lots of fun organizing these korfball activities in the Champittet Summer Camp. Not only did the children travel back to their home countries with fresh knowledge about this brand new sport to them, but also the local supervisors discovered korfball, which might be very useful in the future!

Our next goal is to organize some korfball regular practice sessions at a local institution. 

See you soon!