Top German professional league interviews Christian Hentschel

Christian Hentschel, director of the Sports Academy in Dormagen and friend of USA Team Handball, helped coordinate the youth national teams' time in Germany. He was recently interviewed for the Toyota Handball Bundesliga's website about the trip. Below is a loose translation; read the original (in German) here: http://www.toyota-handball-bundesliga.de/magazin/artikel.php?artikel=9259&menuid=225&topmenu=227

You are hosting international guests currently in your boarding school in Dormagen?
Hentschel:  Yes. We have presently the U-18 national teams of the USA Team Handball as our guests.  This is something special, since the USA Team Handball for the first time in a long time has U-18 national teams on course.

Are all the young people from the United States here to complete training?
Hentschel:  That is partially correct. The players and player who met here in Dormagen largely became a not insignificant part in Europe and live in individual cases even yet here.  Two of them come even from Germany. With the men, there is a player who is with a regional league team of the Rhine Neckar Lions. And Sophie Fasold is a goalkeeper who lives in Munich and plays with DHB.

How is that going then?
Hentschel: The games being played here by the U-18 American teams here in Germany are not official international matches. Additionally, in that age there exists a chance to change associations.

Do you closely attend to your guests?  
Hentschel: We accompany the young people during their entire stay. For example, we were together in the arena in Cologne when VFL Gummersbach begans its season against HSG Dusseldorf. Otherwise they are happy to simply be in their rooms.

Is this trip based on the co-operation between the Toyota Handball Bundesliga and USA Team Handball, formed a few months ago?
Hentschel: No, this is a pure TSV story that binds itself however very wonderfully into that cooperation. Matt Sabatino takes care of these kinds of external contacts for the military academy West Point, and Dieter Esch, president of USA Team Handball, and general manager Steve Pastorino, are also the reasons the new generations of youth national teams are here in Germany.

What does the TSV then have to do with West Point?  
Hentschel:  The TSV has close cooperation with the West Point Military Academy in the New York which has been going on for more than four years. At that time, they sought a location to get foreign experience with its team, and since then the connection exists.

Were there already various visits?  
Hentschel:  Yes. I myself was also already repeatedly in West Point and trained there.  For a long time, a member of the team has lived always here in Dormagen.  Presently its Keith Fine, who is 24 years old and lives in our players’ shared apartment. The academy supports this program prepared specially for its soldiers both financially and conceptually.

And its expanded into Dormagen and West Point, the league and USA Team Handball.
Hentschel:  One can see that. In this context we got about three weeks ago that inquiry in which the U-18 the US association was in search of a training camp. To accommodate what lay more closely there, than both teams here.