HC Saratov

Penalties decided it in 2017: Saratov's handball side beat Dinamo-Viktor Stavropol 35:33 from the spot to take bronze at the Russian Cup. A year later they did it again, seeing off SKIF Krasnodar 30:26 for a second bronze running.

By then the club was known simply as SGAU-Saratov, after the Saratov State Agrarian University, its sponsor and namesake. The team plays in the Superleague, Russian handball's top flight, and its best campaign there came in 2019/2020, when it reached the semi-finals and finished fourth.

That same season brought a change of identity: in August 2019 the club dropped its old yellow-and-green kit for yellow and black, the colours behind the nickname Yellow-Blacks. Two seasons later it tested itself abroad, reaching the last sixteen of the EHF European Cup in both 2020/21 and 2021/22.

None of that looked likely a decade earlier, when Saratov still had to work its way up from the second tier: runners-up in the Higher League in 2012/13, then champions of it a year later, which brought promotion. The line runs back from there to the handball team of the Saratov agrarian university, whose veterans set the club up on 20 July 2011 and registered it as a public organisation a month later, giving Saratov handball a senior side of its own again.