Henan hosts intl korfball competition for first time

"Even though korfball looks similar to netball or basketball, korfball is special," Ma said. He explained it is played by two teams of eight players, with four women and four men on each team or with eight players in each team, and the objective is to throw a ball through a bottomless basket mounted on a pole standing 3.5 meters high.

"There are more than 500 clubs and over 100,000 people playing korfball in the Netherlands. Dutch people, including the young and the old, the males and the females, all like playing it. It looks like a big family sport," Jan-sjouke van den Bos, performance director for korfball in the Netherlands, told China Daily.

In fact, korfball has more than 100 years of history, as it was invented in 1902 by the Dutch school teacher Nico Broekhuysen, and the sport is popular in the Netherlands, Belgium and Chinese Taiwan.