Dragunas Klaipeda

In 2021 a club from a 500-seat hall on the Baltic coast won the Baltic Handball League.

The name is younger than the club. It played as Gintaras through the 1960s, then as Maistas for nearly three decades, then briefly as Klaipėda, before the Dragūnas identity was adopted in 1999. Under that name it has taken the Lithuanian Handball League title ten times, including in 2025, and the run has not been evenly spread — three finishes as runners-up and five bronzes sit in the record too, so the ten titles were not collected in one uninterrupted stretch.

The Lithuanian Cup has followed a similar pattern in recent years, and the final has become something close to a fixture between Dragūnas and Granitas-Karys Kaunas: the two met for the trophy in 2019, 2022 and again in 2025, with Dragūnas winning each time. Varsa-Stronglasas Alytus is the other name that keeps recurring on the domestic scene.

Among the players who came through the club, Jonas Truchanovičius went on to win the EHF Champions League with Montpellier, a rare line on a Lithuanian handball résumé. Dragūnas also runs a reserve side, Viesulas-Dragūnas, and a women's team, feeding players back into a club that still plays its league games in Klaipėda, in a hall built to hold a few hundred people rather than thousands, and rarely leaves the top of the table for long.