Tulln Women

The Tullnerinnen enter the season in the WHA Meisterliga carrying, for once, a benchmark to defend rather than a history to explain: last season, 2024/25, they reached the semi-finals under coach Željko Gasperov, the furthest UHC Gartenstadt Tulln's women have gone in the competition. Whether that run was a ceiling or a floor is what the current campaign will answer.

Nothing in the women's side's record matches it against the club's own men's team, whose Austrian Cup wins in 1997/98, 2003/04 and 2006/07 still sit at the top of any list of UHC Tulln honours. The women have never lifted the national championship or the ÖHB Cup, which makes the semi-final run a genuine departure rather than a step on an established curve. Corinna Flandorfer's Foreign Player of the Year award in 2006/07, won while at Tulln, remains the individual highlight on the women's side of the club's history.

Matches against UHC Stockerau carry their own billing, the NÖ-Derby, sometimes the Donau-Duell, and count for more locally than league position suggests. Home games are played in front of up to 3,000 at the Josef-Welser-Sporthalle, in red and black.

The club itself dates to early 1946, founded by young men returning from the war who set about introducing handball to Tulln an der Donau. Eight decades on, it is that same club's women's section chasing a first Meisterliga title its founders never saw played for.