VfL Lübeck-Schwartau

The gymnastics club that gave rise to VfL Lübeck-Schwartau's handball department had nothing to do with the sport at its start: Männerturnverein Bad Schwartau was founded in 1863 as a men's gymnastics society, and handball came along as one department among others, decades later. That department was hived off into its own legal entity in 2002, and in July 2017 the side took the name it carries now, a rebrand meant to signal a club that belonged to the whole region rather than one town.

Its one Bundesliga campaign to remember well is 2000/01, the season it beat HSG D/M Wetzlar 30:23 in the final of the DHB-Pokal. The club had reached the top flight before, in 1990/91 and 1991/92, but it was that cup run a decade later that gave the place something to point to.

Thomas Knorr, a left back, is the name attached to the club across three separate spells, from 1988 to 1992, again in 2001 and 2002, and once more from 2007 to 2011.

The fiercest fixture on the calendar is the Nordderby against HSV Hamburg, a rivalry with an odd root: HSV Hamburg itself was formed in 1999 out of a merger that pulled in HSV Lübeck and VfL Bad Schwartau, meaning the two clubs facing each other now share a piece of the same family tree.