Arendal

Arendal sits on Norway's south coast, a shipping and shipbuilding town that has spent the past century looking to water for its living. Handball there grew inside Øyestad Idrettsforening, a multi-sport club, and stayed a section of it until 2009, when the men's elite side split off as its own legal entity to compete in the top flight. The team now plays as ØIF Arendal, known around the league simply as Arendal HK, in red and black at Sparebanken Norge Amfi Arendal, a hall holding 3,000.

The 2014 Cup final settled something the club had been chasing for years: a 23–22 win over Bodø HK brought the NM Cup to Arendal for the first time. League form followed it — series titles in 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2018/19 — before the 2019/20 season was cut short by the pandemic and handed to Arendal as silver rather than played out. A second Cup final, lost to Elverum in 2021, kept the side among the teams other clubs plan for rather than around.

Local weight falls on the meetings with Runar Sandefjord, close enough in geography and history that neither side needs the fixture explained to them.

No one is tied to that 2014 run more than Preben Vildalen, who helped drag the club up into the top division in 2009 and was still on the floor for the Cup win five years later — 201 caps for Norway across a career that traces the club's own rise. His nephew, Hermann Vildalen, later wore the same shirt and came up through Norway's youth ranks, a small continuation nobody at the club needed to point out.