Aix Maurienne

Aix-les-Bains sits on the shore of Lac du Bourget in Savoie, a spa town better known for thermal baths than for sport, and for half a century its basketball has carried the name of the wider valley rather than the town alone. The line runs back to Aiguebelle, where Maurienne Savoie Basket formed in 1969. In 2005 that club merged with Jeunesse Sportive Aixoise, a side founded in Aix-les-Bains in 1932, and the combination gave the region a single, stronger outfit: Aix-Maurienne Savoie Basket, known today as AMSB.

The club's high point came earlier than the merger, when Maurienne Savoie Basket beat Toulouse Spacer's 64-56 to win the Pro B title in 1997. It has not reached that level again, but it has kept finding ways back to Pro B when it drops out of it: relegated to National 1 in 2015, AMSB won the playoffs the following year and returned at the first attempt. A younger-team prize, the Trophée du Futur, went to the club twice, in 2000 and 2004.

AMSB plays at Halle Marlioz, a hall that holds around 1,800 people, in white, red and black. The fixture that stirs the town most is against Chambéry, the neighbouring Savoie club; locally it is simply the Derby Savoyard, and the history between the two sides gives it an edge that league position alone would not explain. The club has sent internationals through its ranks and onto national teams elsewhere, among them the Swiss guard David Ramseyer, who also collected a Pro B Most Valuable Player award during his time there. Since 2006 AMSB has run a training centre carrying accreditation from the French Ministry of Sports, a formal recognition of the development work that traces back to those two founding clubs of the valley.