I appreciate the effort. You were kind of fun, at least in principle. Plus, all the korfballers (and the coach/trainer guy) were really helpful and welcoming. But you just weren’t fun in practice.

Plus, you’re absurd. So you’re like basketball, except there’s no backboard, you can’t dribble or run with the ball, there are 4 offenders and 4 defenders per team (of which 4 are male and 4 female), and there field goes behind the basket too. That’s cool. So the practices are across the river, and you use a soccerball when you clearly should use a basketball… that’s fine too. The tricky part is that the practices always consisted of lots of crazy drills that I never understood (partially because they were always yelled out in Dutch, partially because they were too complicated for my simple mind). You go here, you go there, throw the ball to him, he throws it back, then you shoot at the basket, then she gets the rebound, then you become the new rebounder and then go to the end of the line. Aaagh! I’d be confused for about four minutes before I understood, and then a minute later, they’d start a new drill.

I think the breaking point was when the coach called out something that sounded like “fifteen dollarball!"* and everyone started practicing underhand layups. Ask me to show you some korfball techniques sometime, it’ll make for a good laugh.

* I later found out it was “vijftien doorloopball”, or “practice fifteen times the walk-through-ball”, and really, calling it a “walk-through-ball” makes just as much sense as calling it a “lay-up.”

All that said, though, I do like the sport in theory. It’s like team handball or basketball without the whole macho charging-into-the-lane thing that frightens pansies like me. Or like Ultimate Frisbee, except you don’t need to know how to throw or catch a frisbee.