Tyneside Titans

Jesmond’s resident Korfball team, the Tyneside Titans, are on the lookout for new plays in an effort to recover the club to its pre-covid stature, and to assist in the costs that all grassroots sports teams are forced to confront.

Coach and players Craig Robson believes that recruitment is a challenge primarily due to the obscurity of the sport:

“Recruitment is a bit of a challenge especially after Covid. I played pre-covid where we had a team of 10 but after Covid there was only 3 of us left so we basically had to rebuild the club again from scratch. We’re now back to a team of 10-12 people and there’s challenges because most people haven’t heard of it apart from those who have played at university or further afield.”

Korfball is a Dutch ball game consisting of two team of 8. By passing the ball quickly, each player must elude their own personal opponent before shooting the ball through the Korf. Both Korf’s are positioned inside the playing area to allow shooting to take place from a 360-degree angle. Following every two goals the set defenders and attackers on each team then switch roles. 

“It’s a mixed gender sports so you get a good mixture of people able to participate and as a club we’re quite relaxed, it’s not formal, not super competitive so it’s a sport that a lot of people haven’t played or even hear of so everyone basically starts from new when they join so it makes it more of a level playing field. People join out of interest because it is quite niche.”

Player and club treasurer Simon says that more effort needs to be made by Sport England to promote the less-known sports: “We have talked to Sport England to look at free sessions that will really only target people that haven’t played before and want to take it up which is something that we encourage. It would be useful if there was something similar to freshers week that would be very beneficial to us and other smaller sporting clubs.”

The Tyneside Titans train every weekend at the Newcastle School for Girls in Jesmond and play in a highly competitive local league against teams including two from Newcastle University.

“We’re starting to look at alternative ways of getting people involved through things like social media, we put quite a lot of stuff on Instagram and other streams like that o going forward it’s going to be a different approach in that direction. Looking at the demographic of Korfball, it’s going to be almost exclusively aimed at younger adults or anyone between their early 20s and late 30s but anyone wanting to play and is fit is capable of playing and are more than welcome. 

If you would like to get involved with the Tyneside Titans you can message the club on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/titanskorf or follow the team on Instagram @Titanskorfball. 

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