The aim of this study was to clarify the historical transition of U-10 athlete development in German handball. We performed a text mining analysis regarding the articles about U-10 athlete development in the monthly journal "handballtraining" (1988-2018) and quarterly journal "handballtraining JUNIOR" (2012-2018) published by the German Handball Federation. The historical transition of U-10 athlete development was divided into 5-year periods from 1988. The main results were as follows. For the first 5 years, the need for "children`s handball" was encouraged by presenting the ideas, which are to develop game sense systematically and in the long term, and to recommend using balls suitable for children. The next central theme was encouraging children to learn offensive defenses by playing games and developing individual skills in attacks. Afterward, the long-term athlete development system was established, and the mandatory game format was implemented. A recent central theme was proposed to develop individual attack skills through practices that the children could enjoy. It was inferred that the turning point in the U-10 athlete development occurred in 2003 when the offensive defense became obligatory in the game. One of the reasons for the obligatory adoption of defense formation could be that the content and method of the training activities were not changed by coaches even when they were provided seminars and practice drills to help realize the children-specific concept in handball. We conclude that for Japan, to work on a new U-10 athlete development in handball, providing a guiding philosophy on the kind of players who should be developed and how to train them is an urgent issue. As a policy for accomplishing this idea, it would be suitable to change the game format, as done in Germany, or to change the education of the coaches, which might have been ineffective in Germany. These results suggest the need to develop a new policy and implement the necessary changes in one of the aforementioned methods.
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