Hapoel Galil Elyon

Every conversation about Hapoel Galil Elyon eventually reaches 2008, the year owner Chaim Ochiyon took the club's top-division license and moved it under the name Hapoel Gilboa Galil, later Hapoel HaEmek. The original club dropped to Liga Bet, the fourth tier, and had to climb back up on its own.

The climb back took thirteen years and ran through several mergers before Liga Leumit was won in 2020–21 and the top flight reached again. It was a second such rebuild for a side that started out in Kfar Blum as Hapoel Kfar Giladi in 1972, took its current name in 1978, and had already shown once what it was capable of.

That first proof came in the 1992–93 season. Under coach Pini Gershon, Galil Elyon beat Hapoel Tel Aviv 4–0 in the final to take the Israeli Basketball Premier League title, and in doing so ended Maccabi Tel Aviv's run of twenty-three straight championships. No club outside Tel Aviv had won the league in that span. A run to the Saporta Cup semi-finals in that same golden 1992–93 campaign showed the level carried into Europe.

The label attached to the club since, "the Israeli Basketball College," points at what replaced silverware as its currency: players such as Oded Kattash, Gur Shelef and Lior Eliyahu came through there before their names meant anything elsewhere. Home games are played in front of 2,200 people at the Feis Arena in Kfar Blum.