Medal-seeking Spanish men arrive at 2014 Goalball World Championships

June 29, 2014

's arrived in, Finland Friday for the start of the 2014 IBSA  World Championships. The team comes into the tournament with the goal of securing a medal, which would qualify them for the in Rio de Janeiro. The team missed the 2012 Summer Paralympics.

Head coach Francisco Monreal said, ""

Coming into the competition, the team was ranked eleventh in the world based on the IBSA Unofficial rankings published late last month, down one spot from the April rankings. The team is scheduled to play their first game against the ninth ranked men's team on Monday morning, before playing twenty-first ranked  later in the afternoon. Their other scheduled competitors in pool play are top ranked, third ranked , seventh ranked , twelfth ranked and twentieth ranked. The team needs to finish in the top four in their group to advance to the second round.

The team's roster includes Jose Daniel Fernández, Cristian Santamaria, Félix Vargas, Roman Martínez, Jesús Santana, and Javier Serrato. They are led by head coach Monreal, with assistant coach Carles Estrany and physiotherapist José Bravo. The team is drawn from around the country, with Santana playing for a club in the Canary Islands, Serrato playing for Valencia, Fernández for Madrid area, Santamaría for , Vargas coming from Barcelona and Martínez from.

Absent from the 2012 Summer Paralympics, the last major international competition the team competed in was the 2010 Goalball World Championships in, England where the team finished fifth. In last year's IBSA European Goalball Championships in Turkey, the team finished second, behind World Championship hosts and Paralympic gold medalists Finland.

Goalball was created in 1946, exclusively for people with a visual disability and designed to help with the rehabilitation of veterans returning from World War II. Play in the Paralympics consists of two twelve-minute periods, with a three minute break between halves. Players are blindfolded to ensure all are equally visually handicapped on-court, and the game can be stopped to ensure goggles are properly fitted. Standing in front of a long goal, they throw the ball at the opposition team's net who in turn try to block it by listening to the ball, which contains a bell, and using their bodies to prevent the ball from going in. The audience is asked to remain silent during play.