Bern

A student handball side at what is now called TV Oberseminar gave Bern its first team in 1951, set up by Emil Horle; within a decade the club had dropped that name for BSV Bern, and the group Horle started went on to become the standard-bearer of the sport in the city. A merger with Handball Muri Bern in 2002 folded the two clubs together as BSV Bern Muri, a name the club carried until 2018, when it reverted to BSV Bern and the nickname stuck: the Bären.

The championship years belong to an earlier era of the club, three titles won in 1961, 1980 and 1985, and nothing since has matched them. The Swiss Cup has gone the other way entirely: five finals — 2004, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2018 — and five defeats, a run long enough that it now reads less like bad luck than a pattern.

Antoine Ebinger's twelve years at the club, from 2007 to 2019, span almost the whole of the Bern Muri period and the return to the old name with it, longer than any of the players around him managed to stay. The Berner Derby against Wacker Thun remains the fixture that matters most locally, ahead of the wider league rivalry with Pfadi Winterthur.

Home games are played in Gümligen, just outside the city, in a hall holding 2,350, in red and white — the same colours the club wore back when it was still known by the name a schoolteacher gave it in 1951.