Amir Seifert will be the Israeli representative at the World Handball Championship that will open tomorrow (Wednesday). The 23.5-year-old Seifert, the center of ASA Tel Aviv, chose to represent the USA, which will meet the teams of Morocco, Croatia and Egypt in the championship, in the first stage of the games in Jonkoping, Sweden.
“I am very excited to take part in the World Championship with the US team,” said Seifert. “We are training hard to present the highest possible ability in the competition, with the main goal being to bring the USA its first victory in the senior world championships. I would like to take this opportunity to officially thank the Israel Handball Association for the journey I went through in the junior teams of Israel, for my participation in the project Germany, for my military services as an outstanding athlete and of course for supporting my transition to the US team. As a symbolic gesture I will play number 18.”
In recent years, the US team has been building for the Olympic Games that it will host in Los Angeles in 2028. Seifert managed to drive a stake, after Assaf Bengozi had time to play with him on the US junior team at the World Under-19 Championship held in Spain. Ben Liberty also made a number of appearances, as players who hold a dual passport (as, by the way, quite a few of the players in the US team).
“In terms of the competition, we are at home with Egypt, Croatia and Morocco, so the main goal is to beat Morocco,” says Seifert, “Our team is young and is built with the Los Angeles Olympics in mind in 2028. As part of the preparations for the Olympics, the American Handball Association takes part In the project of the World Handball Association to promote American players”, Seifert clarified in an interview on the website of the Handball Association. “That means to place them in big clubs and to subsidize the wages and accommodation of these players to the clubs. I am also considering joining the program.”
About ASA Tel Aviv, the player said: “I am very happy to play in the club where I grew up. This is ASA’s first year in the Premier League after several years in the second league, and I think that after just one round, we showed that we are a legitimate team in the league and that we have a place to stay. We don’t have foreign actors and we don’t have a big budget. We have players who have something to prove, who come to every game to fight. Most of our games in the first round were close throughout, and I think our short roster hurt us significantly. For the second round, we are strengthening with Eliran Markowitz, Shahar Lustigman and Amit Kurtzman who returned from the youth team project in Croatia, as well as Nadav Habib who came from Ramat Hasharon, Lior Shein who moved from Herzliya and Jonathan Wolff who moved from Maccabi Tel Aviv.
“We know what we’re worth and I’m sure that these reinforcements will give us the air we need to show it,” Seifert added. We come to every training session with a smile. Milos the coach tears us up, and we leave with a smile. Everyone here is studying or working at an extra job or in the army, and we still come to every training session and every game as hard as we can. We are not motivated by money and we are not motivated by personal success. I think that when the whole club is united and when everyone sacrifices themselves for a common goal, you can feel something different in our games. In my eyes, we are the most interesting team in the league.”
In addition to Seifert, there is another representative of the Winner League in the championship, Risto Vajcic, from the Montenegrin midfielder of the champion Hapoel Ashdod, who was included in the Montenegro squad that will face Spain, Iran and Chile in the first stage. Due to the participation of Seifert and Wojcic in the World Championship, the games of Hapoel Ashdod against Ramat Hasharon and ASA Tel Aviv against Hapoel Kiryat Ono at the opening of the group stage on the 20th of the month – were postponed.