Lodz Women

Tegel is a district in the north-west of Berlin, built around a lake and for decades known to most of the city as the place where its main airport stood. The airport closed in 2020. The neighbourhood's sports clubs, which had been there long before the runways, stayed.

Verein für Leibesübungen Tegel 1891, or VfL Tegel 1891, is one of them. The name is the old German term for a society of physical exercise, and it describes what the club was built as: a general sports association for the district rather than a team for a single game. Handball came under that umbrella, and the women's section still plays under the same roof as the rest of the club.

The section trains and plays in the Halle im Tegel, a local sports hall rather than an arena. Handball at this level in Berlin depends on such halls, and clubs of Tegel's kind fill them with their own members, families and neighbours. The club runs its handball affairs from its own website, tegel-handball.de.

The club's age gives it a different kind of standing from a newly formed side. It was founded when Tegel was not yet part of Berlin, and it has outlasted the changes that reshaped the district around it, including the airport that later defined its name for outsiders.

1891 to 2026 is 135 years.