Niklas Haupt has successfully built on sand. The 26-year-old student of Accounting and Finance plays handball: in Kelkheim in the hall at the Oberligaklub TSG Münster – and on the sand with the beach mopets Oberursel. On the beach, Haupt is a whiz. At the European beach handball championship, which will run until Sunday in Varna, Bulgaria, he will be part of the German national team for the first time. On Wednesday, the selection of the German Handball Federation (DHB) reached the main round despite a 2-0 defeat against Russia, in which they are now chasing their minimum goal until this Friday: the quarter-finals.
Last September, national coach Konrad Bansa Haupt had invited as a reserve player to a squad training course and was quickly won over by the Oberurseler. “Dedication and fitness,” says Haupt, were the most important arguments. A bit of understatement already resonates in the cautious self-assessment. Because anyone who has ever seen Haupt play on sand will quickly recognize its qualities.
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In attack, he shines as a reliable shooter and also inspires with the usual spin shots in beach handball, in which the shooter does a spectacular pirouette over the sand before the throw. In defense, the Hessian is a terrier, impresses with his aggressive style of play, which in the beach variant has much less to do with physical contact than in the hall. In the game against Russia, Bansa, who is still known in Hessen as a former goalkeeper and coach of TSG Münster and HSG Frankfurt, only used the all-rounder on the defensive.
In the attack by the opponent, the aim was to control a man who is something of an icon of beach handball: the 34-year-old Russian Roman Kalashnikov. With his crazy spin shots he has been making the beach handball world dizzy for 17 years. Against the young team from Germany, which had many new players, he only got six points. “But then others just met,” says Haupt about the strong opponent Russia, who only narrowly secured the two points from half one (19:17) and half two (18:16) and thus a little happy 2-0 against the Germans won. Since the DHB selection had defeated the Netherlands the day before, they moved into the main round despite two lost games in the four-team group D, in which Croatia, Poland and Sweden are now the opponents.
For Haupt, beach handball is now much more than what it was for him six or seven years ago. “The focus was much more on fun,” he says. The fun of the game is still there, but today it has nothing to do with the boozy events from the early years. “We are extremely disciplined,” he says. Apart from the hotel in downtown Varna and the city beach on which the EM courts are set up, he has not yet seen anything. Especially not the Golden Sands, the party stronghold of Bulgaria, a few kilometers away.
Only when the tournament is over should there be a party for the players. Overall, the scene has become very professional. This also has something to do with the trend sport’s Olympic ambitions – even if the dream of competing in the Summer Games in Paris in 2024 does not come to fruition.
That he found his way into the national team so quickly is perhaps also due to the fact that in addition to the Oberurseler, two other Hessians are active in the team of national coach Bansa: Stefan Mollath and Sebastian Jacobi. Both play indoors for the same club as Haupt: for TSG Münster. The two start on sand for “Beach & da Gang”. This is the sandy department of TSG Münster.
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