Gracemount Edinburgh Handball Club
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| Gracemount Edinburgh H.C | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Full name | Gracemount Edinburgh Handball Club | ||
| Nickname | Gracemount | ||
| Founded | 2002, as Gracemount Eagles H.C. | ||
| Head coach | |||
| Captain | |||
| League | Scottish Handball League | ||
| 2008/09 (1) | League, 2nd. | ||
Gracemount Edinburgh Handball Club was formed in 2002 by Fred Wallace as part of the rebirth of the Scottish Handball Association. In the beginning, the club started with about ten 11- to 13-year-old children training once a week, learning basic ball control skills. Over the next 6 years though, the club has expanded hugely and now boasts a sizeable youth team and a large senior men's team.
The club has operated out of numerous venues in the southside of Edinburgh. In the beginning, the local leisure centre at Gracemount was used but as the club expanded there was a need for more regular training sessions and better facilities. Since 2005, GEHC have been training at high schools at Liberton and Gracemount, both with new sports facilities available.
From 2006 onwards, GEHC has seen a large influx of foreign students joining the team while studying in Edinburgh. These students, mainly from mainland Europe have had previous experience with Handball as it is a professional sport on the continent. Due to this, the less experienced Scottish players have been learning from a vast pool of experience and improving rapidly.
For the first 3 years of Gracemount's existence, the club was solely focused on Youth development. Over the course of those 3 years, Gracemount took teams to the Partille Cup in Sweden. Results became gradually better over the years, but due to the scale of the sport in other countries, Gracemount lost most of their games to strong European teams. Despite this, the experience was extremely valuable as the young players were introduced to different styles of play and were able to witness handball played by experienced teams.
In 2004, many of the older Gracemount players were selected to represent the Scotland U-16 squad, and played games against England, Ireland and a German regional team. The Gracemount players in the squad were very influential in the Scotland U-16 squad's victory over Ireland in the Liverpool Tri-Nations Tournament.