The Spin: Joyce van Haaster on handball and navigating uncertainty

Joyce van Haaster discovered handball in her childhood and even stepped up to the Netherlands’ youth team. Goalkeeping was not her first choice, but after experiencing life between the posts, she continued to develop on this path.

“I still remember that match, my first match, we won by three. I was so excited that I wanted to play every game in the goal,” she tells co-hosts Bengt Kunkel, Víctor Tomàs and Andrea Lekic.

Everything changed when she received the cancer diagnosis: “In 2002, I felt something in my leg, and at one tournament there was a ball hitting my leg and it hurt a lot. And days after it still hurt, so I went to the doctor and then to the hospital. It took a while before they knew what it was, but then they found out that there was a tumour in my leg about the size of a stick of butter, so it was quite big,” recalls van Haaster.

Recovery was challenging, and the Dutch athlete had to undergo chemotherapy and radiation, as well as additional surgeries — including having an artificial bone placed in her leg — before thinking of returning to sports: “All that together took about three and a half years before I could really recover.”

Despite having a 10 to 20 per cent chance of survival, according to the doctors, Joyce van Haaster relied on discipline to help her stay grounded and positive, while also benefiting from the support of her family and friends.

“Every time [something happened] I gave myself three days to be sad and really angry and really mad,” she admits.

That difficult time kept Joyce van Haaster away from the court, but she tried everything she could to stay close to handball.

“I tried every time to go to my team, if it was possible. I wanted to go to the matches and I wanted to be there with my teammates. And I went into the dressing rooms, because that’s what I missed the most, not being with the girls in the dressing room after the game.

“I really wanted to play a game, I wanted to win, I wanted to lose, I wanted to play with a ball. It took me a while before I found a way to step into a wheelchair because I worked so long to not get into a wheelchair, and then I shouldn’t sit in it for fun,” shares the international wheelchair handball icon when discussing her return to playing sports.

Her first choice was wheelchair tennis, but after a few years she got into wheelchair handball, which was still in its early days in her country.

“In the Netherlands we started in 2014 with demonstration games and training at handball clubs. After a year or so, we had five or six teams in the Netherlands. In 2015 was the first European championship with only four countries: Norway, Sweden, Portugal and the Netherlands.”

Despite never having played a match at an official championship before, van Haaster and her teammates claimed the trophy in 2015, and since then she has added many more medals and distinctions to her collection, including numerous All-star Team awards.

The focus now is on the EHF Wheelchair EURO 2025, which takes place between 26 and 30 November in Vilnius, Lithuania, where the Netherlands are among the nine nations in the competition — and this will mark van Haaster’s seventh participation in a wheelchair handball tournament.

“I’m so honoured that there is somebody who can give wheelchair handball a voice on a bigger scale, on a bigger platform,” adds the Dutch wheelchair handball goalkeeper while discussing her involvement in EHF’s latest initiative Her Playground. She is one of the four athletes involved in the Role Models project, alongside three other world-class handball figures: Norwegian goalkeeper Katrine Lunde, French back Estelle Nze Minko and Serbian playmaker and The Spin co-host Andrea Lekic.

Listen to the latest episode of “The Spin” to find out more about Joyce van Haaster’s journey, the development of wheelchair handball in Europe and what being a role model means to her.

Photos © kolektiff (main & in-text), Nuno Brites (in-text)