VfL Bad Kreuznach
The VfL Bad Kreuznach (complete: Association for physical exercises 1848 Bad Kreuznach eV ) is a German sports club from Bad Kreuznach . The basketball department of the club played a major role in the upswing of their sport in Germany, mainly because of the pioneering work of Hermann Niebuhr , the "father of German basketball".
History and departments
founding
The association was founded on March 28, 1848 in a restaurant in Bad Kreuznach, the first chairman was Peter Engelmann , who later founded the University School of Milwaukee . Within a short time the association had 70 to 80 active members. While the meadow tent was used as a sports facility at the beginning, meetings were held in the “Russischer Hof” bar. In the decades that followed, gymnastics was practiced almost exclusively until further independent departments were founded.
basketball
After returning from three years of teaching in Istanbul, Hermann Niebuhr founded the first basketball department in a German sports club at his home club in 1935. As a result, Niebuhr also wrote the first basketball textbooks and rules in German and ensured the spread of the sport in Germany on courses at universities and with interested sports clubs. At the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin , basketball was an official Olympic competition for the first time after the official separation from handball, and the host German Reich also had to provide a team. In addition to teams assigned to the Army and Air Force, the Kreuznach basketball players were the only German club basketball players who met for a preparatory tournament in Bad Kreuznach in June 1936. While the team from the Heeressportschule Wünsdorf near Berlin, under the direction of Hugo Murero , who had introduced the basketball game at this sports school in 1932, won the tournament, an Olympic team was formed from the group of participants and former handball players, including three from Kreuznach were: Niebuhr as non-playing team captain under coach Murero, as well as Jupp Schäfer from TV 1848 and Otto Gottwald from PSV Bad Kreuznach, who were not used. In 1939 the first official German basketball championship was held, in which VfL won the group against Gießen and Dortmund, but lost the final against the Luftwaffensportschule Spandau and thus became the first runner-up. A short time later, the game operation died, as everywhere in Germany, due to the Second World War .
Even after the Second World War, some VfL players made it into the national team. In 1959, after becoming champions of the Rhineland-Palatinate , the club made it to the quarter-finals of the German championship. Two years later, VfL's first men's team was relegated from the Oberliga Rheinland-Pfalz and missed out on the development of the best basketball teams in Germany. While other clubs hired full-time coaches and built large sports halls, VfL only had honorary functionaries in office, and games were played in a small hall in Jahngasse . In the following years up to 1970, the men's team played in third class, with the exception of individual seasons, below the Oberliga Südwest, which was second class after the establishment of the Basketball Bundesliga . Instead, Rudolf Anheuser and Manfred Ströher represented the association as arbitrators on an international level. Anheuser was only the second German basketball referee at the Olympic Games and directed games at the 1972 Olympics in Munich . Ströher, who had meanwhile been an expected referee for the German Basketball Federation , finally became president of the national association in 1984 and remained so for ten years until 1994.
After playing second-rate for some time at the beginning of the 1970s, after relegation in 1974 they voluntarily returned to the then fourth-class national league. After the establishment of the 2nd Bundesliga basketball league , VfL briefly returned to the now third-class Regionalliga Südwest under the leadership of ex-national player Manfred Schitthof . After you couldn't keep up there in terms of sport, you went back to the now fifth-class national league. In 2007 he returned to the Oberliga Rheinland-Pfalz and later moved up to the 2nd Regionalliga Südwest (North), which as of 2013 represents the fifth-highest division in Germany.
hockey
The VfL Bad Kreuznach women's team played in the German indoor hockey Bundesliga in 1985/86 . In addition, the future national player Niklas Meinert comes from the youth department of the club.
successes
- German basketball runner-up (1939)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The “basketball” phenomenon. (PDF (188 KB)) (No longer available online.) Deutscher Basketball Bund , pp. 519/520 , archived from the original on October 28, 2012 ; Retrieved on March 21, 2013 (repro of a book chapter).