Barrington Cultivates Team Handball, A Growing Sport In Other Parts Of The Globe

(CBS) – It's a rare chance to get your kids at the forefront of a high-impact Olympic sport. Team handball -- already a sensation across the globe – is catching on in one northwest suburb in a big way.

In Barrington, coach Craig Rot trains the only youth team handball club in the United States supported by the Olympic governing body.

The seven-on-seven game is played with goalies, a ball half the size of a soccer ball and on a field larger than a basketball court.

"I try to compare it to the physicality of water polo," Rot says.

Tryouts held earlier this year allowed Rot to take two teams to represent the USA at the 2015 Partille Handball World Cup in Sweden. Six students from Barrington Station Middle School made the cut.

"It's a big honor to represent our country in a big way, considering we're the only team that's around this area," Ty Baker, 12, says.

The Partille Cup is no small tournament, comprising 43 countries and more than 20,000 participants.

With concussions causing concern in other sports, the coach touts handball as a contact sport alternative.

"Unlike football and rugby, where head contact is a direct part of the game, in handball, it's the freak occurrence," Rot says. "We actually have sanctions against contact to the head."

So far, students in six elementary schools and a middle school in Barrington play in P.E. classes.

Rot is working to get the sport in more districts and plans to train coaches and set up clubs in other cities.

"Ten years from now everybody will be playing it," Baker says. "That would mean a lot to me and I bet all of our teammates."

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The USA team will be playing in a tournament at Northeastern University  in Chicago coming up on Oct. 24.