Bjarte Myrhol’s goal: “Make handball coaching easier and more accessible”

Often, the best ideas arise when you are faced with a challenge and searching for a solution. Ten years ago, Bjarte Myrhol had just such an idea. 

“If your child wants to play handball, the team needs a coach. Often, it ends up being the parents — but how can they teach such a complex sport as handball in the simplest possible way if they were not top-level players themselves?”

This was the question posed by the Norwegian record international, who ended his career in 2021 following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, with 263 national team appearances and two World Championship finals (2017 and 2019) under his belt.

“Not every child can have a national team player as a father,” Myrhol points out.

Together with his brother Atle, Myrhol founded the online platform Learn Handball at the end of March 2016. The aim: to make it easier to be a youth handball coach by providing tailor-made training sessions for boys and girls aged 6 to 16+ in video form, explained in a simple and age-appropriate way.

“It’s about the joy of handball,” the Norwegian says. Now, individual teams, clubs, and even entire national federations have subscribed to Learn Handball.

“All training sessions are designed in that way that even beginners with no coaching experience — in other words, ordinary parents — can carry out these exercises. The videos, which we all produce ourselves, are the key support, as everyone can immediately see how the exercise should be performed,” says Myrhol.

“Providing sport for children is an important responsibility for society, and our platform helps by offering a low-threshold, accessible solution.”

And it seemed as though the handball world was waiting for this innovation.

“We launched the platform in Norway, and it quickly became a real hit. Out of 650 handball clubs in Norway, 380 use Learn Handball — that’s an incredible market share,” says Myrhol, who has also been head coach of the Norwegian top-division club Runar Sandefjord since 2024.

In 2019, an app was added alongside the online version of “Learn Handball”. Myrhol admits: “We had never programmed an app before, but we experimented, learned, and eventually created it.”

By then, it was obvious that Learn Handball would expand beyond Norway’s borders — first to Denmark, then to Germany. As a former player for Rhein-Neckar Löwen, Bjarte Myrhol was a good friend of Swiss superstar Andy Schmid. The current Swiss national team coach was immediately enthusiastic about the platform and, alongside Myrhol, became Co-founder of the German version, on the market since 2020, together with Swiss national Viktor Glatthard, who has lived in Norway and is a CEO of Learn Handball.

“Then came Covid. Many sports halls were closed, and many clubs had to suspend their training operations. We were faced with the next challenge. But we then produced a large number of outdoor training videos,” Myrhol says.

“That remains one of our major advantages to this day: we always want to innovate, and as a small company we can react quickly to developments and constantly generate new ideas. Thanks to the extensive feedback we receive, we know what our market wants and what youth coaches are looking for. We also continuously incorporate our subscribers’ suggestions into the platform.”

As young people need role models, many world-class players also share their skills on Learn Handball, including IHF World Players of the Year Mathias Gidsel (Denmark) and Henny Reistad (Norway), Norwegian superstars Sander Sagosen and Nora Mørk, as well as Germany’s Uwe Gensheimer, Juri Knorr, Jannik Kohlbacher and Emily Vogel, and, of course, Bjarte Myrhol and Andy Schmid.

“Seeing these cool tricks and tips is an incredible source of motivation for young players,” says Myrhol. New video series are uploaded three to five times a year.

Today, the Learn Handball platform has over 50,000 users in more than 50 countries, by clubs ranging from the Caribbean to India and Brazil. The core market, however, remains Europe — particularly the Scandinavian countries, as well as Germany and Switzerland.

In 2024, the first contact with the European Handball Federation (EHF) was established, and since November 2025, Learn Handball has been the Official Digital Coaching Partner of the EHF. The EHF contributes its extensive network of federations and clubs, as well as its expertise, to further support grassroots handball development in Europe by digitally scaling access to top-level coaching exercises and methods.

“Since the launch in November 2025, our collaboration with the EHF has quickly become a real success story. We have received many enquiries from federations that want to make our platform available to all their clubs,” says Myrhol.

As part of the partnership, the EHF has also integrated topics such as injury prevention into the platform. To mark the 10th anniversary of Learn Handball, Bjarte Myrhol presented the platform on 25/26 March at the EHF Conference for Secretaries General in Lisbon. For Myrhol, this is exactly the right path: “Partnering with the European Handball Federation brings us closer to our main goal: to make handball coaching easier and more accessible — especially at grassroots level.”

More information: https://www.learnhandball.com/. Learn Handball is also available as an app and can be downloaded for iOS and Android.

Main photo © kolektiff; Feature photos © Xavi Vegas, MOL Tatabanya KC