“Go Vikings! An Officially Incomplete History of Handball in Newcastle and North East England” has been published to mark the fifth anniversary of Newcastle Vikings Handball Club being established in September 2012.
It includes a short history of handball and it’s emergence in Great Britain, before setting out a chronological history of how the sport has developed in Newcastle and across Tyneside, Wearside and the wider North East since the late 1960s up to the present day. From the heyday of the late 60s and early 70s when Newcastle University and Sunderland Technical College were at the forefront of handball’s growth in this country, to North Tyneside’s ground-breaking junior clubs of the 1990s and early 2000s, the revival of handball at Newcastle University just before the London 2012 Olympic Games and then the ongoing Olympic legacy evolving over the past five years led by Newcastle Vikings, Sunderland and Durham University, “Go Vikings!” provides a fascinating insight into handball’s growth and development in the region over the past 50 years.
In chronicling the history of Newcastle Vikings Handball Club, it provides a statistical record of match results, players, appearances and goalscorers from each of the club’s league and cup seasons, from their 2013/14 debut in the Scottish Handball Leagues to their achievements over the past three seasons in the English Regional Development League North divisions since 2014/15, together with the many other senior and junior handball tournaments involving the Vikings and other North East clubs.
Also published alongside “Go Vikings!” is a scrapbook archive “The Vikings Vault” which provides an illustrative record of newspaper and online articles relating to handball in the North East of England, from the late 1960s up to the present day. You can click on the video images in both documents to view the linked YouTube videos.
If you have any further knowledge, photographs and other interesting information about handball’s history in Newcastle and the North East, particularly from the earlier years of the 1960s/70s and 1990s/2000s, we would love to hear from you with view to adding to the record in future editions, so please get in touch with us at media@newcastlehandball.co.uk.
[gview file=”http://newcastlehandball.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/History-of-Handball-in-Newcastle-and-NE-England-print.pdf”]
Scrapbook archive: [gview file=”http://newcastlehandball.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Vikings-Vault-Scrapbook-Archive-print.pdf”]