Tournai

Two students from the Collège de Kain, Michel Bataille and Patrick Chantry, set up a handball side in Tournai in May 1974. There was just a school with players and nowhere for them to keep playing once term ended, and the club they built has carried the name of that college ever since: L'Estu, short for Estudiantes.

Promotion came slowly and then not at all for long stretches. Brabant-Hainaut regional honours in 1977–78 pushed the club into Division 3, and it took thirty years to clear the next rung, winning Division 3 in 2007–08. Four seasons later, in 2011–12, L'Estu took the Division 2 title and reached the Belgian top flight for the first time. Patrick Chantry stayed involved long after his playing days, coaching the side and later serving as its president, and his son Benjamin and grandson Corentin have both worn the shirt since.

The best of it came in 2018–19, when Tournai finished second in Division 1, its highest league placing, and took a run at Europe, reaching the preliminary round of the EHF Challenge Cup before losing to the Cypriot side Parnassos Strovolou on aggregate. A semi-final appearance in the Belgian Cup followed the year after, in a season cut short by the pandemic while L'Estu sat third. The seasons since have settled into a mid-table pattern, eighth place in three of the last four campaigns, with provincial derbies against Entente du Centre CLH in Hainaut providing the sharper edges of the calendar.

Home games are played at the Hall des Sports de la C.E.T., where 400 permanent seats and telescopic stands bring capacity up to 1,900 for the nights Tournai's crowd fills it out.