Throttur Nes Women

The sports hall in Neskaupstaður is a working building shared with the local school, tucked into a town on the East Fjords, and it is there that Þróttur's women play a level of volleyball that has no business coming out of a town this size. The capacity of the hall is not the point; the point is that a squad drawn from so small a place has twice in three years finished the season as the best in Iceland.

Þróttur Neskaupstaður was founded in 1923 as a multi-sport club, and the town has stayed loyal to it across decades in which a place this remote might easily have let a small sport slide. The women's team plays in yellow and black in the Mizunodeild, the top flight of Icelandic volleyball, and first reached the summit of that competition in 2008. It took fifteen years to get back, and then it happened twice running: the title returned in 2023, and in 2024 Þróttur beat HK Kópavogur 3-2 in the final to defend it.

Setter Sylvía Kolbrá Hákonardóttir ran that 2024 team, with Sunna Júlía Þórðardóttir at opposite and Atli Freyr Björnsson coaching them to the deciding set. A year earlier, in the 2022 cup, Þróttur had gone out to KA Akureyri at the semi-final stage, one of the sides against whom this rivalry is now measured season to season, alongside HK Kópavogur and Afturelding.

None of that changes what happens on a match night in Neskaupstaður: the fjord closes in around the town, the hall fills with people who know most of the players by name, and Þróttur takes the court as the champions of a country that mostly forgets this corner of it exists.