When Johannes Golla recently traveled to Turda with SG Flensburg-Handewitt, it wasn’t just the 15-hour trip via Hamburg, Warsaw and Cluj airports before the national team captain reached Transylvania by bus. The 28-year-old had little time to prepare for this European League away game in Romania because the SG only reached their distant goal late on the match day.
And then she hit an unusually hard ground. The usual light blue Gerflor PVC flooring was stuck to the hall floor. This is prescribed by the European Handball Federation (EHF). But there wasn’t much underneath. Is this a risk of injury?
“Hard or soft is not that important”
Confronted with this, Golla’s national team colleague Matthes Langhoff says: “Hard or soft is not that important for me. If you fall on a hard floor, it hurts a little more, but you don’t get off as well from a soft floor when jumping. It’s more important that the floor is clean – I remember youth games where we slipped because it was dusty or stuck because there was still resin on it.” Several times during the game, the professionals dip their fingers into the resin pot to be able to grip the ball better.
Neither sliding nor “sticking” is desired for backcourt players like Langhoff with countless rotational movements and changes of direction. All backcourt players experience knee pain. Whether floors play a role in these and other injuries was recently discussed in Melsungen, where the condition of the floor in the old training hall was suspected of contributing to the flood of injuries.
Call to Dr. Patrick Luig. The national trainer for education and science of the German Handball Association quickly gets to the point. The scientific study situation on hall floors is manageable – Luig knows it and classifies it. First of all, the 43-year-old, who has conducted research on this topic himself, points to structural progress: “In the 1970s, we still encountered concrete floors that were painted over green. That is long gone. Now all floors installed in the first and second Bundesliga are the same – at least in terms of the surface.”
One immediately thinks of Joachim Deckarm: On March 31, 1979, the best German player at the time hit his head so hard on the thin ground in Tatabanya that he fell into a coma. He still suffers from the consequences to this day. The new rubbers from the Troisdorf manufacturer Gerflor are much softer.
Modern glass subfloors have disadvantages
The substructure is also crucial: “If you build directly on concrete floors, the floor is harder. Then the loss of force is less, which means the damping is worse. With every landing, with every change of direction, more forces act on the body. You notice that after the game if you’re not used to it,” explains Luig. Modern glass subfloors also have disadvantages: They are also hard and vibrate comparatively little.
Luig warns against simple cause-and-effect attribution. No direct “more” or “less” risk of injury can be derived from the hardness of a floor: “In the long term, the nature of the floor can play a role – for example in jumps, landings and changes of direction repeated thousands of times on surfaces with little vibration. At the same time, the human musculoskeletal system is adaptable. Muscles, tendons and ligaments can ‘get used’ to the stress.”
Like Matthes Langhoff, most players appreciate a dull floor because then the force is transferred more directly when starting and changing direction and they slip less. But too blunt isn’t good either, says Luig, because then the shoe can “lock” on the ground, which increases the risk of twisting or twisting.
He finds advertising stickers in the intensively played zone at nine meters particularly problematic. Especially from the big EHF and IHF tournaments we know the pictures of players slipping there. Luig has already pointed out the danger to the organizers several times and suggested sticking the advertising closer to the middle of the pitch, where there is less going on.
HBL specifications for training halls are conceivable
The actually relevant and influenceable point is cleaning. Luig says: “It’s not the floor itself or the resin that is the problem. It becomes critical when floors are not cleaned consistently over a long period of time.” In event halls such as Hamburg, Berlin or Mannheim, the floor is laid or glued before every home game. It makes a big difference whether the floors are cleaned of resin and dirt before storage, immediately after the end of the game, or whether they are just “parked” uncleaned. This is a question of cost.
The training halls also play a role. The professionals spend more time there than in league games. Here there is a mixture of club-owned halls like in Kiel, school sports halls like in Flensburg or the opportunity to train in the arena like in Magdeburg. From Luig’s point of view, HBL specifications for training halls would be conceivable – with the aim of improving the conditions for the players and preventing recurring discussions like the ones recently in Melsungen.
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