Incidentally, Schmid's real name is André. "That's my real name. But I couldn't pronounce it when I was a little boy because I couldn't roll the 'r'. And my mom always called me 'Andy' for as long as I can remember," says Andy Schmid, who today also signs his contracts as "Andy Schmid".

As a Swiss, the centre-back loves the country-specific order in many things - especially when it comes to paperwork. "But this side of him is the complete opposite of order in our room - it's a lot of mess," reveals Patrick Groetzki, with whom he shared a room on away trips.

"I can only confirm it 100 percent," says Andy's wife Therese. He is definitely a thinking person, but is sometimes ruled by his emotions. "I'm unaffected by stress when it comes to sports, but if I have too much on the to-do list next to the track, it gets chaotic at times," admits Andy Schmid.

The Swiss met his wife Therese 13 years ago through a former teammate - a holiday flirtation in Sandefjord turned into more and she visited him in Switzerland. "At the end of these ten days of vacation, I said to her: If you want, you can move to Switzerland with me" - as if said as done.

The two children, Lio (9) and Levi (5), therefore grow up multilingual in Mannheim. The handball player speaks Swiss German with his sons, mum Therese speaks Norwegian to them. To bring his sport closer to his sons, Schmid became a writer: his children's book "Mein Sprungwurf" (My jump shot) is about respect, justice, friendship and the best sport in the world.

"A matter of the heart," says Andy Schmid. "I read a lot with my children. And one night when I was going to bed, my oldest boy asked me why there were books about children playing football but none about handball." After all, he couldn't read the story of "Fuchsi", the mascot of Füchse Berlin, to his son - so he decided to write a book himself.

Bringing handball closer to children is his passion. That is why Andy Schmid also invests a lot of time in the "Learn Handball" project, which his friend Bjarte Myrhol launched. With over 600 training videos, the founders of the app want to give young coaches of all ages and performance classes inspiration for their daily training to get even more children and young people excited about handball.

"I think it's a bit outdated to just prepare the training on paper," explains Andy Schmid. "You can't reinvent handball, but I think some things can be presented much better and communicated in new ways to appeal to a wide audience in an entertaining way."

Source: Sascha Klahn, https://www.handball-world.news/o.red.r/news-1-1-1-136473.html