ATW Winterthur

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The abstinence gymnastics club and ball game club Winterthur , ATW Winterthur for short , was a Winterthur gymnastics and handball club .

history

The club was founded as the Abstinenten-Turnverein Winterthur (ATV Winterthur) on January 9, 1939 in the alcohol-free restaurant "Heimat", where the Theater Winterthur now stands, by members of the Blue Cross and the Winterthur student association "Humanitas". Jacques Spörri became the first president. A year earlier, a team made up of the founding members had already participated in the municipal handball championship as “abstainers” and landed on 2nd place behind Pfadi Winterthur .

Immediately after it was founded, the club had to get through a difficult first phase during the Second World War. A majority of the members did military service and due to the blackout regulations , no training sessions were allowed in the evening. From 1944 to 1946 you could only take part in the championship with the help of the city ​​police , otherwise there were too few members. At that time they were more successful in netball , where the abstainers in the Winterthur region were the most successful team and even survived one season undefeated in 1945. The club temporarily provided up to four teams at basketball championships. At the same time, Otto Weber, a teacher at the Free School in Winterthur, founded a women's team and a little later a men's team. In the meantime, people also took part in street and orienteering runs .

From 1947 the club again took part in the handball championships with its own team, but had to start over in the third division. This was followed by two ascents in a row, so that in 1949 the Winterthur team already played in the first division and threw the national league club HC Rohrschach out of the competition in the Swiss Cup . In the same year, a women's team took part in the handball championships for the first time. In field handball, Winterthur played in the first division for ten years before being relegated to the third division again in 1958 and 1959. As a consequence of this crash, the club stopped playing netball in favor of handball. This measure was successful: Under Oberturner Hansjakob Bertschinger, the club returned to the first division and stayed there until the field handball championship in 1971.

When indoor handball was introduced, ATW Winterthur was one of the first clubs to provide a team there and played there in the second highest league until the establishment of the National League B (and shortly afterwards), in the sixties they were once champions of Northeastern Switzerland region. In the meantime the club was renamed to Abstinenten-Turnverein und Ballspielklub Winterthur , but only the abbreviation ATW Winterthur was used .

In 1969/70 the club was relegated to the 2nd division again, after which it was never enough for the men to move up to the 1st division, especially since new competition arose on the Winterthur square with the establishment of Yellow Winterthur . In contrast to the men, however, the women now became stronger: While the men were relegated to the fifth class 3rd division in the 1980s, they were able to move up to the 1st division in the 1982/83 season and played in the 1988/89 season Thanks to the women's department, the club even entered the highest Swiss league for the first time in its history. On September 10, 1989, the club celebrated its 50th anniversary with a final match in the Swiss field handball cup on the Schützenwiese , at that time the club still comprised 218 members. 1989/90 they were able to save the women on the last day of the relegation round from direct relegation from the top division, but in the 1990/91 season they did not succeed in the same feat and the team rose again.

The ATW Winterthur no longer exists.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 25 years of abstinence gymnastics club . In: The Landbote . July 17, 1964, p. 8 .
  2. ↑ The handball club with the successful women . In: The Landbote . No. 204 , September 5, 1989, pp. 15 .
  3. ^ Stiftung Edition Winterthur (Ed.): Winterthurer Yearbook 1990 . 37th year. Winterthur 1989.
  4. ^ Stiftung Edition Winterthur (Ed.): Winterthurer Yearbook 1991 . 38th year. Winterthur 1990, p. 275 .