Lebbeke

Before Buggenhout entered the club's name, it was the rival across the parish line: HC Buggenhout and Lebbeke's own HBC Ajax Lebbeke tried merging in 2002, the arrangement broke apart within a year, and Ajax disappeared with it. Out of that collapse, in 2003, Elita Lebbeke-Buggenhout was formed — a club built to hold together the two towns that had just failed to combine.

The name reached back further than the merger. Elita had been the club's identity long before, when a table tennis society founded in 1959 turned to handball, absorbed a second local club, Vamaro Lebbeke, in 1966, and then gave up the Elita name altogether in 1969 for SK Avanti Lebbeke. It was under Avanti that Lebbeke handball had its best years: the men took the Belgian First Division in 1972 and 1973 and the Cup three times, the first Flemish club to hold league and cup together, while the women's side won five championships between 1974 and 1984. Sponsorship renamed the men's team Boule d'Or in 1983, and by 1986 the men's section had left for Buggenhout altogether, competing there as Avanti Buggenhout until money and results ran out — the men folded in 1989, the women a year later. Choosing "Elita" again in 2003 meant going back past all of that, to the name the club carried before it ever won anything.

Home games are played at the Farys Sportcentrum in Lebbeke, holding around a thousand, and the club is known locally simply as De Club. Among the players who carried the Avanti years, Dirk Verhofstadt stands out: he came through at Elita in the late 1960s, returned for Avanti's run through the 1980s, and was named Belgian Handballer of the Year in 1983.