Granitas-karys

In 1987 a team from Kaunas, playing under a name most of Europe had never heard, won the IHF Cup — and came back the following year to lose the final.

The club has changed its name four times: Atletas, then Politechnik, then Zalgiris through 1972, before Granitas settled as the permanent identity. Voldemaras Novickis, who won Olympic gold in 1988 and a world title in 1982, and Jonas Kaučikas, the leading scorer in that IHF Cup final, played through both eras.

Granitas took the league title every year from 1991 to 2005, fifteen championships in a row, then added two more in 2008 and 2009 for seventeen overall — a run no other club in the country has come near. The cup record runs alongside it: eleven titles between 1990 and 2018. Since 2009 the championships have stopped, replaced by silver in 2012 and 2022 and bronze on five further occasions, the gap itself a measure of how far ahead the club had been.

HC Dragūnas of Klaipėda is the team Granitas meets most often when a final is at stake, a fixture with no settled name but a habit of deciding where the trophies go. Games are still played at the LSMU Veterinary Academy hall on Tilžės Street, the same city where the run began under a different name in 1959.