Longericher

Thirty-seven, thirty-five — that was the scoreline in the first round of the 2026/27 DHB-Pokal, and the club on the winning side, LSC Köln, was not the one anyone expected to be there. Nordhorn-Lingen play two tiers higher, in the 2. Bundesliga, and still went home beaten by a side that trains and plays in a school sports hall.

The handball section at Longericher Sport Club has not had a straight run to that kind of night. From 1975 the club merged its handball team with ESV Olympia Köln, playing under the name SG Olympia Longerich, and it was under that name, not LSC's own, that the team reached the second-tier 2. Bundesliga Nord in 1984. The merger held until 1988; when it ended, LSC did not inherit that standing but started again from the Kreisliga. Peter Heimerzheim , who came through in the Olympia Longerich years, went on to play Bundesliga handball for Bayer Leverkusen and VfL Fredenbeck — proof of what the merged side had once been capable of producing.

Getting back up took decades. Christian Stark coached the club to the Oberliga Mittelrhein title in back-to-back seasons, 2014 and 2015, and that second promotion put LSC into the 3. The club still trains and plays its league fixtures at the LSC Arena, a hall inside the Carl-von-Ossietzky school with room for 450 spectators, though for its bigger occasions it has borrowed the Motorworld Köln, which holds up to 1,200.

Derby weekends against TSV Bayer Dormagen carry their own weight in Cologne, and last August that fixture ended in a 29:27 defeat in the DHB-Pokal. Beyond that, the cup run against Nordhorn-Lingen aside, LSC have yet to find a way back to the second tier they once reached under a different name.