SINGAPORE – Sweden’s dominance of the Women’s World Floorball Championship (WFC) can be traced back to the 2005 edition in Singapore.

They finished third, behind champions Switzerland and runners-up Finland, and vowed to make changes. Since then, the Scandinavians have won all eight editions of the biennial tournament.

The Swedish women’s head coach Asa Karlsson, an assistant coach at the 2005 championship, said that tournament highlighted the importance of physical conditioning.

The team implemented guidelines thereafter. For example, VO2 max tests were introduced to measure the body’s ability to consume oxygen and deliver it to the cells per minute.

Karlsson, a former player who won the 1997 world championship, said: “It set a standard for the ones who wanted to be part of the national team, they needed to train harder to keep up.”

The Swedes were in the Republic for a training camp last week ahead of the Dec 2-10 WFC, which will again be held in Singapore.

During their trip, they beat three-time SEA Games champions Singapore 24-0 in a friendly and also conducted an intra-squad friendly.

Karlsson, 54, said the 2005 competition was “an experience that we learnt a lot from” and said the camp was useful to acclimatise to the conditions, something the team struggled with nearly two decades ago.

The sport’s popularity is another key factor for the country’s success on the international stage, said Sofie Andersson, 34, head of national teams at the Swedish Floorball Federation.

Sweden has a population of 10 million and more than 500,000 people play floorball regularly at work, school or with friends.

There are around 112,000 licensed players and today, floorball is the country’s second-largest team sport after football.

Andersson, a former national player who competed at the 2013 and 2015 WFCs, said: “We have a lot of players, which means the breadth is quite big and the top will also be better and have more competition.”

For Karlsson, floorball provided a platform for girls to pick up sports when it was introduced in her home town in the 1980s.

She had wanted to play hockey but did not have the opportunity as the locker room was reserved for boys. The fact that floorball is played indoors also made it easy to be played across all seasons, she added.
 

Forward Maja Vistrom, 22, believes the faith in and support for young players have also been vital. She said: “The ability to always focus on picking up young players and being patient with them is a winning point.

“I learnt a lot (from senior players) to see how they behave in every situation and they’re also very friendly, so it’s easy to be a part of this.”

While no one from the national team plays full time as they have work or school commitments, a competitive club scene provides top-quality playing time.

Andersson said: “We’ve had a good league for a long time so the daily development for the players is important for you to have an elite culture where you don’t just come to the national team sometimes over the year. It’s important to have daily practice in your club, that’s the high level there.”

Clubs have worked at improving the social benefits for players in the past five to 10 years by partnering companies around local areas to allow for more training opportunities.

This includes increasing salaries so they can focus on floorball.

But maintaining their dominance has not been easy with floorball gaining recognition worldwide and other teams getting stronger.

Over the past three decades, the International Floorball Federation has grown from three founding members to 79 member federations and over 30 countries participate in WFC qualifications.

That has not deterred Sweden from engaging other countries in their efforts to develop the sport globally. Andersson said: “We see the development and we feel they are getting closer, but can we help to quicken things up?

“Maybe we won’t benefit from it but 10 years from now maybe the sport will, so we try to help in some way.

“We believe that being open in what we do and sharing and going to trips like this, we can all benefit as a sport.”

Early bird tickets for the 2023 Women’s World Floorball Championship began on May 26, with prices starting from $20 (youth aged six to 17) and $32 (adult).

Source Website: https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/the-swedish-secret-to-global-floorball-success