Bjelovar Women

Ana Marija Gavrić started here as a left back before Lokomotiva Zagreb and then Brest picked her up. Karmela Pokopac went the other way, arriving in goal from Podravka Vegeta along with wing pair Antonia Oremović and Lea Vukojević, and it is that trio now carrying a side that has held its place in the top-flight 1. HRL since promotion in 2014/15.

The championship banner in the club's cabinet dates back further than the current name: in 1963, playing as RK Partizan, the team won the title of the Socialist Republic of Croatia. The step closest to matching it came only in 2022, when Bjelovar reached the Croatian Cup final and lost. In between, fourth-place finishes in 2017/18 and 2018/19 were enough to earn a run in the EHF Challenge Cup.

Home games are played at the Dvorana europskih prvaka, the Hall of European Champions, where a recent renovation stripped out roughly a hundred seats and left capacity at around 1,400. Against ŽRK Koka Varaždin, the fixture that matters most to the Bjelovarke and their supporters, that hall tends to fill.

The section that would become ŽRK Bjelovar first took shape inside the Physical Education Society Partizan, in February 1955, years before either the Partizan or Bjelovar name meant anything to a scoreboard.