Mirjam Haenen, a voluntary worker from Norway, has introduced the sport of Floorball to the children in South Africa.

Ms. Haenen has gained experience in teaching the sport to school kids in South Africa before, but has now received the required assistance from the IFF. The IFF has supported the project in South Africa by sending educational material as well as Floorball equipment to Mirjam Haenen and as you can read in the report from Ms. Haenen below, the children love to play.

“Last week I started playing Floorball with the kids here. This is my third week in South-Africa and I had to settle in a bit before starting with floorball….. But now we have started and the kids love it! They have good feeling of the ball and some have heard of Icehockey before, which makes it easier to explain the rules. Some, however, have never seen a stick in their lives, but just imitate the others :-).

I have played floorball on a school (ages 7 to 15) and I played it on the area of my project together with the younger kids.

I have red the IFF Floorball kit manual ´how to teach floorball to youth´ and this will helps me a lot with excersizes and getting the kids even more enthousiastic. The first ´practises´ were not structured yet, I just let them play around a bit and get an idea of the sport and get excited. Next week I will start with proper training, including passing, handling of the stick and some basic rules. They are constantly asking when they can play again, so that´s a good thing!

As you can see in the attached pictures we dont have an indoor playing hall and play floorball on the grass outside. I will see what the possibilities are here to make a trainingfield, including a fence or so.”

You can read more about Mirjam Haenen’s work on her website.