Loimu

For twelve years, from 1979 to 1991, the team that carried Raisio's name did not play a single home match in Raisio. Kerttula had no hall fit for the top division, so Loimu-79, as it was known then, moved its games to the Samppalinna Sports Hall in Turku. Supporters back home resented it, felt the club had drifted from the town that raised it, and the friction lasted the whole stretch. It was also the club's strongest run: three straight championships in 1982, 1983 and 1984, with finals reached in other years besides. Only when Kerttulan liikuntahalli opened in 1991, built to the required standard, did the team return and drop the suffix, going back to the plain name Loimu.

The club had been playing volleyball since 1958, long before that detour, and picked up three more titles after coming home, in 1990, 1997 and 2001, alongside a run of silver and bronze finishes stretching from 1978 into 2010. A Finnish Cup followed in 2004, and Loimu added a Nordic title in 2008 by winning the NEVZA Clubs Championship.

The derby that matters most is the short trip to Turku, against TUTO Volley — the Turku Area Derby, or paikallispeli, as it's called locally, a fixture sharpened by the very years Loimu spent playing on the other side of that rivalry's ground. Matches against VaLePa and against Lempo-Volley from Pori carry their own weight too, usually when qualification or league positioning is on the line.

Kerttula holds around 1,300 people now, orange and black in the seats, in the hall whose opening is the reason the club plays under its own name, in its own town, at all.