Alfred Balen

Alfred Balen (born January 2, 1930 in Zagreb , Kingdom of Yugoslavia , † December 7, 1986 in Zurich ) was a Yugoslav- German water polo player and coach.

Life

Balen started playing water polo at BPK Crikvenica when he was 15 immediately after the war . After graduating from high school, he played for PKMedvescak from 1950 to 1955 while studying law . With these he was several times Yugoslav champion. After 1955, he decided against a career as a lawyer and instead became a coach (he spoke and worked in eight languages). After an engagement in Egypt he was national coach in Mexico from the end of 1964 until after the Olympic Summer Games in 1968 . While there were hardly any water polo players in Mexico, Balen brought everyone together, trained them 40 hours a week and with them came 3rd at the Pan American Games in 1967 and 11th at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. He then went to Berlin in 1969 as a regional coach , brought together all the good players at Wasserfreunde Spandau 04 and won three European Cups with Spandau, won the Supercup twice, eight German championships and the German cup eight times. In the one-piece water polo Bundesliga, his team won 256 of 278 games between 1977 and 1986, played eleven draws and lost only 10 games, only one of them at home. After Spandau had won the European Cup in Zurich, he thanked each and every one of his players (after jumping into the pool), drove back to the hotel and died of a stroke. He is buried in Spandau.

training

He revolutionized water polo training: he required his players to train twice a day (1 × strength, 1 × in the water every day when no game) and wanted water polo not to be understood as a sport for former swimmers, but with its own foundation. So he made sure that the fastest of his water polo players also successfully participated in the Berlin championships.

Honors

Balen was voted the most successful water polo coach in the Western Hemisphere in 1967. He was inducted into the Water Polo Hall of Fame. A street in Spandau was named after him. The Alfred Balen Cup takes place annually in Berlin.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alfred Balen. In: wasserball-helden.de. Retrieved February 6, 2017 . 
2. ↑ Pictures from Alfred Balen on YouTube
3. ↑ Straddle under water . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1981 ( online ).
4. ↑ Alfred Balen: Water polo and swimming need the same basis. A contribution to the problem of the basic work of water polo youngsters. In: Competitive Sports Volume 4, Number 2, 1971, pp. 106-107.
5. ↑ Uwe Graells: The outnumbering behavior of national teams in modern water polo: an analysis of the water polo tournament of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona with the help of a sport-specific method of systematic competition observation. Dissertation, University of Göttingen, 1996.