Ajdovscina

Handball arrived in Ajdovščina as a men's game long before it had a section of its own: the town played "big handball" for years, and it took until 1954 for the small-court version to get a formal home inside RK Ajdovščina, a club whose roots go back to 1922. The name the players carry, Sinovi burje, "sons of the bura", comes from the wind, and it has stuck harder than most of what the club has won.

What it has won is modest, and the club's own history admits as much: no Slovenian Cup, no top-flight title, nothing to put alongside the sides that dominate the 1. A league. What it does have is a run from the early 1980s, remembered locally as the first golden generation, that took the Slovenian Republic Championship in 1982 and reached fourth and sixth place at Yugoslav youth level. Patrik Leban came through the same club roots before 2007, went on to play for the national team, RK Celje and Germany's HC Erlangen, and remains a name Ajdovščina points to when it wants to show what the youth setup can produce.

More recent seasons have been about survival and repair rather than silverware. Relegated from the 1. B league after a single campaign in 2019, a drop the club president at the time put down to being financially unprepared for that level, Ajdovščina spent three years in the third tier before beating RK Drava Ptuj 28:22 under coach Mirko Žvokelj to win promotion back for 2023/24. The club marked its 70th anniversary that year with a tournament against Croatia's RK Zamet and a lifetime achievement award for Pavel Piccinini, one of its first generation of players. The second tier is still where the team sits, and a first senior trophy is still what it is missing.