Borussia Dortmund Women

Dortmund is a city that measures itself against one club. The handball department plays a quieter role in the same black and yellow, playing its matches at the Sporthalle Wellinghofen.

The women's team traces back to 1926, two years after Borussia Dortmund first set up a handball section, and it has spent the century since working in the shadow of the bigger ballgame next door. The German championship came in 2021, and it came without a single defeat across thirty matches. The German Cup arrived first in 1997, against TV Lützellinden, and returned in 2026 with a win over HSG Bensheim/Auerbach, while a European title followed in between, the EHF Challenge Cup taken in 2003.

Alina Grijseels captains the side now, a German international who left and came back, which in a squad built partly on returners — Kelly Vollebregt among them, back from the Netherlands scene in 2024 — says something about what the club still offers players who have already tried being elsewhere. In the Handball-Bundesliga Frauen, the matches that matter most come against SG BBM Bietigheim, Thüringer HC and TSV Hannover-Burgdorf, games the league calls a Spitzenspiel rather than anything sharper; handball in this city has never needed a derby name the way the football does.

It is still, at bottom, the section that grew out of a multi-sport club founded in 1909, handball added in 1924, the women following two years after that.