Krasnodar

The idea came from Vitaly Sorokin, a former basketball player who coached at the Kuban State Pedagogical Institute and wanted his students playing a team sport of their own. That was 1963, and the side he put together carried the institute's stamp for years afterward, changing its name as the place around it changed: Burevestnik first, then University in 1972, then SKIF in 1979, a name built from the words for a sports club at an institute of physical culture. Later spells as Arcadia-SKIF and SKIF-Rosneft came and went, but the line back to Sorokin's students never broke.

The strongest stretch fell at the end of the Soviet years. Krasnodar took the USSR Cup five times running between 1987 and 1991, then closed out the union's last season as national champions before adding the CIS title in 1992, when clubs from the former Soviet republics still met in one competition. An IHF Cup won in 1990 remains the club's mark on European handball. Since then the podium has come more often in bronze: ten third-place finishes in the Russian championship between 1997 and 2017, with the 2017 Russian Cup standing as the one recent trophy to sit alongside the old Soviet haul.

Fixtures with HC Viktor Stavropol are still billed as the Southern Derby, and finals against Chekhov Medvedy have gone both ways, a cup won in 2017 balanced against defeats in 2015 and 2021. At the Sports Palace "Olymp", where 2,600 can fit in for a Cup night, the club shares its home and its academy with the women's side, HC Kuban Krasnodar, without ever meeting them on the court.

No name from Krasnodar's history carries further than Andrei Lavrov's. The goalkeeper won three Olympic titles wearing the club's white and blue before his career took him elsewhere, and it's his stops that Students supporters still measure the next keeper against.