Competing in just its eighth season at the professional level, Hamburg Towers has made massive strides in its short club history. But climbing from Germany's second division to its 7DAYS EuroCup debut in such a short time is just one small part of the ambitious play of a club that has started building a tradition in a city that did not have much basketball success in the past.
The Club Scene: Hamburg Towers
Club Scene
5 Mins read
Even though it's the country's second-largest city, Hamburg has not been a mainstay of German basketball. The city's first basketball club, Johanneum, founded in 1952, played in Germany's elite level at first, but then spent decades in the lower divisions. The club finally made strides in the late 1990s, drawing a large number of kids to its youth teams while earning promotion to play in the 1999-2000 first division, where it spent two seasons under the name BCJ Hamburg Tigers.
That success did not last, however, and the team declared bankruptcy in 2002. A newly founded BC Hamburg tried to take its place, but unsuccessfully, and basketball slowly started to disappear from the sports map of the city.
There was a new beginning in 2006, however, when Marvin Willoughby, a Hamburg-native and former national team player, joined with Jan Fischer in founding the Sport Without Borders association to combine sports and social work for the youth in the city. The program, which promoted values such as fairness, respect and tolerance to young people through sport, also gained success on the court, as two youth Hamburg Pirates youth teams that trained with Willoughby climbed the ranks in Germany youth leagues, too.
Then, in February 2013, former EuroCup star Pascal Roller and entrepreneur Wolfgang Sahm announced a plan to bring back professional basketball to Hamburg for the first time in over a decade. Joined by Willoughby and his program, Hamburg Towers was founded. The club not only had great ambition to reach the German first division as soon as possible, but also a plan on how to get there and stay there.
"We want to build something from the bottom up", Willoughby said at the time. "Only then it is guaranteed that there is enough substance to keep a first division team in Hamburg. Structures are far more important to me than money. "
Thanks to a wildcard for the 2014-15 season in the German second division, the club played its first game against Giessen 46ers on September 29, 2014, starting its journey. Hamburg edged Giessen 65-66 on the road and won its first home game, too, a 74-64 decision to inaugurate edel-optics.de Arena in Wilhelmsburg, the club’s home to this day.
Hamburg finished eighth with a 15-15 record that season, reaching the second-division playoffs, but lost against s.Oliver Baskets Wuerzburg in the quarterfinals. Hamburg kept competing in the German second division for the next four seasons. The team finished fifth in the 2015-16 regular season but was swept in the best-of-five quarterfinals by Gotha, then finished ninth and 10th in the next two campaigns. However, everything clicked for Hamburg Towers in the 2018-19 season.
With Willoughby as the team's sports director, Hamburg put together a competitive roster led by Beau Beech and Jannik Freese. After finishing the regular season fourth with a 19-11 record, Hamburg beat Rostock Seawolves, Niners Chemnitz and Nuernberg Falcons in the playoffs to win the second-division title and promotion to the German League. Justus Hollatz's triple to lift Hamburg to a 99-94 win in Game 2 over Nuernberg, and a 186-184 series win on aggregate, was just one in a line of historic moments for the young club.
Hamburg's debut among the German League elite in the 2019-20 season was a rough one. In the opening round, Hamburg suffered a 111-55 defeat on the road against FC Bayern Munich, while its first victory came in the third round, a 75-79 road triumph over Giessen. The team had a 3-17 record, all three being road wins, when the season was halted because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But no team was relegated, and the German League was expanded to 18 teams in the 2020-21 season, allowing Hamburg to keep its place in the German elite. The club brought in Pedro Calles, one of the best young coaches in Europe, replacing Mike Taylor, and found the right chemistry with players like Maik-Kalev Kotsar, Kameron Taylor, T.J. Shorts and Jordan Swing.
Coach Calles guided Hamburg to an impressive 2020-21 season during which the team beat ALBA Berlin and Brose Baskets twice, split victories with Bayern and qualified to the playoffs by having finished the regular season in seventh place with a 21-13 record. In the best-of-five quarterfinals, Hamburg was swept by ALBA, but the results laid groundwork fo an invitation to the 2021-22 7DAYS EuroCup.
History was made on October 19 this season, when Hamburg hosted the mighty Partizan NIS Belgrade, led by coach Zeljko Obradovic, for the debut of any Hamburg basketball club in European competition. Partizan grabbed a 97-106 win in a highly entertaining game, while Hamburg waited until Round 4 for its first win, a 96-100 decision on the road against Lietkabelis Panevezys with Lukas Meisner scoring 20 points.
What makes the club even prouder than the results it has achieved is the way it has done so. Hamburg's U16 and U19 youth teams have been making the German playoffs every year for more than a decade. Meanwhile, the likes of Hollatz and Osaro Rich are examples of homegrown players who went from youth teams to compete at the EuroCup level. Others, like Ismet Akpinar of Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul and Louis Olinde of ALBA Berlin, went from Hamburg Pirates to the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague.
Investing in youth and strong values has fueled and helped sustain the growth of Hamburg Towers. Needing less than three years to go from the German second division to become the EuroCup's fourth highest-scoring team through Round 5, the club is building a basketball legacy in the world-renowned city of Hamburg.