Kriftel

Kriftel's volleyball department heads into the current campaign still measuring itself against its own recent standard: six straight Hessenpokal titles running through 2024, followed by a run to the final in 2026 that broke the streak of wins without breaking the club's grip on the competition. The men's side sits below the top flight of German volleyball now, but the 2025 season brought a runner-up finish in the 2. Bundesliga South.

That earlier period is the one the club still measures itself against. Between 1990 and 1994 Kriftel spent three seasons in the Bundesliga itself. Igor Runow played through that stretch, a European champion in 1987 and 1991 and a vice-world champion in 1986, and his presence at Rossertstraße said something about how far the club had reached beyond Hesse to build that team.

The youth structure has done its own version of that work more recently. The under-16 side took the German championship in 2013, and Holger Kleinbub, named Germany's volleyball player of the year in 2000, went on to make 140 appearances for the club.

Frankfurt-based Volleyball Juniors gives the club its sharpest fixture, the so-called Hessen-Derby, with matches against TG Mainz-Gonsenheim carrying a similar weight in the regional calendar. All of it plays out in the Weingartenhalle, in a town of barely more than ten thousand people pressed against the vineyards west of Frankfurt.