Frank Bergemann

Frank Bergemann was born on 20 April 1956. Little has been published about his childhood. He trained as a teacher and made sport his subject, and teaching remained his main profession throughout his coaching career, at the Albert-Schweitzer-Gymnasium in Erlangen and at the Realschule am Europakanal in Erlangen.

Bergemann first made his name in the 1990s as coach of HG Erlangen and CSG Erlangen, the clubs from which HC Erlangen later grew.

In 2000 he moved to Austria to coach Alpla HC Hard. He won the Austrian championship with Hard in 2003 and was voted the country's coach of the year.

He then returned to HC Erlangen, then a regional league club in sporting and financial difficulty. The club credits him with starting a long success story: promotion to the 2. Bundesliga Süd in 2008, qualification for the unified second division in 2011, and in 2014 the club's first promotion to the Handball-Bundesliga, with a side made up largely of young students who had played in the small Hiersemann-Halle. He was dismissed in March 2015.

In January 2016 he took over HBW Balingen-Weilstetten in the Bundesliga for the rest of the season; his contract was not extended. From February 2018 to December 2021 he coached Handball Tirol in Austria.

Bergemann worked for decades as a sports teacher in Erlangen and retired from teaching in 2023. In later years he lived on Lake Constance, near Bregenz, where his partner was based, while still spending about half of each week in Erlangen coaching young handball players at school.

Frank Bergemann died on 7 November 2026, aged 70, after a serious illness. HC Erlangen announced his death the following day, and it was reported by the Nürnberger Nachrichten and Sport Bild. No further details of the illness were made public.

Club president Carsten Bissel said that Bergemann had shaped Erlangen handball like no one else, that without him there would never have been a team of young students who stormed out of the small Hiersemann-Halle into the handball world, and that he could motivate people on and off the court like no one else.

Bergemann is remembered as the architect of HC Erlangen's rise from a struggling regional club to a Bundesliga side, a story the club says continues to this day. In Austria his 2003 title with Alpla HC Hard and his coach of the year award made him a respected figure in the Austrian game. As a teacher he passed his knowledge of handball to generations of pupils in Erlangen.