Bensheim-Auerbach Women

Bensheim sits in southern Hesse, and for handball followers its name runs together with Auerbach, the district that gave the merged club half its identity. The team, known as the Flames, plays out of the Weststadthalle, a hall of 2,000 seats that has watched the club's fortunes shift from mid-table anonymity to something closer to relevance.

The merger dates to August 1997, but the handball pedigree in Auerbach runs older: TSV Rot-Weiß Auerbach reached a German championship final in 1977 and a DHB-Pokal final in 1975, a lineage the current club inherited rather than built. What followed the merger was two and a half decades of the second division — 25 straight seasons, 1988 to 2013, punctuated by promotion-final defeats in 2009, 2010 and 2011 that never quite turned into promotion itself.

When promotion finally came, in 2013, the top flight lasted one season before the Flames dropped back down. The breakthrough held together the second time. Heike Ahlgrimm took over as coach in 2016, won the 2. Bundesliga in 2017, and stayed with the club for the best part of a decade, through to the finish of the 2024–25 season. Under her the Flames reached a DHB-Pokal final in 2023, then, in 2023–24, finished second in the Handball-Bundesliga Frauen — the first time in the club's history it had climbed that high — a result that opened the door to the EHF European League.

Bensheim's derby runs against HSG Bad Wildungen Vipers, the Hessenderby, a fixture that carries the weight of two Hessian clubs measuring themselves against each other more than against the table.