This is me: Dinah Eckerle

This is me: Dinah Eckerle

One more match and then my career is over. I took the decision over a long time, so I can say that I'm really happy about the time which is coming afterwards. I'm enjoying now the last weeks. I'm enjoying the last trainings together with the girls. I really try to do a lot outside of the field with the girls, and just enjoy the social way of being a handball player. But I'm really looking forward. 

Finishing the European League winning the title with Thüringer HC was totally insane. I still can't believe that this happened. Of course, we knew we could do it — you don't go to a final four and say to yourself that you will be in fourth place or third place. But we knew it would be so hard. It was just such a big surprise and we were so, so happy. 

For the club, it means such a lot. For me, ending my career with this title, giving something back to the club where it all started — it's just like a dream. It’s really perfect.

I started handball when I was around eight years old, and it was more like a coincidence. A good friend of mine from school went to handball practice, and she told me it's quite fun and I should try. I think my parents were happy that I could get my energy out. I have two big brothers and the house was always full with a lot of chaos, so I tried to do some sports. Before playing handball, I was outside playing a lot. 

My father and my brothers were really good at playing tennis. Everyone else — they didn't have a lot to do with sport. It was just tennis in my family, and no one was playing handball, so it was totally new. When my parents were watching the first matches, I think they didn't even know the rules or anything, but now they love it. 

I really don't know when I realised I could be a top player. When I look back now, it was like this process. You're stepping up every year. You play for a better team every year in the youth teams. At some point you realise you have a talent for it, but how it turned out now, with the career? I never expected it to be like that. I always thought it's fun. I like to be in the goal. But I was never so amazed by myself. I was like, playing in the championship — that's really cool. I think everyone else was more convinced about my talent than I was. 

I moved away when I was 13. I grew up close to Stuttgart. The scouts of Thüringer HC saw me at a tournament and they called my parents, saying they really wanted me to go to their boarding school in Erfurt. They said I could train twice a day and manage school beside that. I wanted to do this. I thought it sounded amazing — moving away from the parents, you know! I had this picture in my mind, that I could stay out late. It was not like that. But my parents were not that into this idea because I was 13. I just talked a lot with them and then we tried it. They said, if it's not working out, you can come back. Then I moved to the boarding school and I never came back. 

But the first six months, they were pretty tough. I would call my mum crying, saying I wanted to go home, it's too much training and I can't do this. I was not that happy the first month, but my mum just forced me to stay. She was like, you started and you will finish at least the first year, and if you're still unhappy after the first year you can come home. 

I remember after half a year, it was like a switch. It just turned and I was so happy to be there and I felt like myself again. I felt comfortable with my teammates and with the school and all this. I think it was just the matter of time, and also at that young age, it's pretty normal that you need a little time to get used to being away from home and all this. From that time on, I was so happy to be there, and I really enjoyed the years there in school. They were an amazing time in my life. 

At the school, there were many kinds of sports — football, volleyball, table tennis, cycling. Every kind of sport is there. You have two hours of school in the morning, then you go to train for two hours, and then you have four more hours of school and then you go to another training in the evening. So, it’s a lot of training and a professional lifestyle from a really young age. 

It was really nice to see how the other sports people were training. In my second year I shared a room with a swimmer, and she was training like crazy. She went to the pool at 6:00 am and was swimming already for one and a half hours when I woke up, so it was really crazy to see how much effort athletes need to put in their sports. It was a nice way of growing up. 

I was 16 when I started playing in the Bundesliga. I turned 16 in October, and I think beginning of November I had my first match, so I was really young. It was because the goalkeeper in our team had a really big injury, so my coaches gave me the chance to play. The first seconds in this match were really amazing. It was a crazy feeling. 

For the national team, I needed to jump in really spontaneously because another goalkeeper was injured. It was just for some training days. I couldn’t believe it when I got the call from the coach. I knew there was Clara Woltering and Katja Schülke and all these big names of goalkeepers in Germany. I was like, Jesus Christ, I will train with them? I was so nervous, but it was amazing. It was the first step in the national team. I was 20. It was a long way from then to go as a number one later. But it was a really big honour at that time, to go at that young age. 

I had been with all the youth stages for Germany, but it's a really big step from the youth level. I think this is the hardest step in your career, because you can be really good in your youth age or in your age level and you can be really talented, but then it's also about working really hard and also maybe being in the right spot at the right time. I really was in the right spot in the right moment. 

I remember I played a really good summer tournament, the Junior World Championship, in 2014. I got into the All-star Team and I was so happy. I knew it would be a hard task when I came back from the tournament to Thüringer HC, because we were three goalkeepers and I was the number three, the young one, and I needed to really fight for my playing time. It was nice to have this confidence boost to go into season feeling like I could play on a really good level and I just really need to fight for my playing time in the club. 

I moved abroad for the first time in 2020, and for sure I knew before that I wanted to leave the German league one day, to play outside. I just recognised that with time I got really bored of the league. I got bored of the team's we were playing against. I had been playing like eight years of something in the Bundesliga, so it felt right to do another step and experience something new. So in 2020, I was like, OK, let's do it now. I feel good. But unfortunately, it was Covid, so it was a shitty time to go to another country.

I went to Siófok in Hungary, but I didn’t get to stay long. They had a really amazing team and if they could have played the 2019/20 season to an end, they would have ended up second and they would have went through the Champions League. But it was all different — the season didn’t finish so they didn’t get promoted to Champions League. They had put a lot of money towards the team. I think it was a really hard situation for the club. 

I really liked it there. It was an amazing time. I liked the club. I liked the team. I liked the environment that we had. There's an amazing hall. There's everything you need to be a professional player. I'm still sad that it didn't work out like I was dreaming. 

So then I went to Metz. Ivana Kapitanovic, she had a cruciate ligament injury I think a week before I broke my contract with Siófok. My agent called them and said, you need a goalkeeper, Dinah needs a new job — let's go. And it was really a nice six months.

Unfortunately, because of Covid, I didn’t get to experience Metz at all. I think it's such a nice city, but we couldn't do anything because France was really strict at the time. To go to work, we needed a paper saying we were allowed to. In that way, it was not the best time, but in a way it better for the team because we were so close together. It was circumstances we never had before, so we just needed to stick together as a team and that was nice to see how we did that. 

It was a crazy season. You never knew what would happen in the next days. Will the match be on or will it get cancelled? Or will anyone in the team get Covid and you're not allowed to train together? It was a time that you couldn’t plan with anything. Also, we needed to test a lot.

But I think the craziest in that time was the empty halls. Every match felt like a training match you have in the pre-season. You could really realise how important the spectators are for sports — any kind of sports — because without them, it was just so sad to play handball! 

I met my husband, Florian, when I played for Thüringer the first time. It was 2018, right before I went to my second club, Bietigheim. I met him here in Erfurt. It was like four weeks before I needed to move to Bietigheim. I said if we want to make this work out, you can come with me, or you don't and then, you know, we cancel everything. He went with me to Bietigheim and it worked out.

When I met him, he was a professional football player and he had a cruciate ligament injury, so in that moment, he was in rehab. Unfortunately, his injury was so bad, he never started football again. After his rehab he started studying and he could do it from anywhere, so that was the positive point — that he could just come with me to all the countries I've been and he could study. He also started working, in Esbjerg, for one of the sponsors, so that was nice for him to get into the working life. 

The time in Esbjerg was one of the best times in my life. It was so successful with the team. I got to play with amazing players, and I think the club is so familial and such nice people are working there. And of course, my daughter Ida was born there, so I have really good memories. We went to the EHF FINAL4 twice. It was just such a nice time in a sporting way but also in a private way. We felt just so good to be in Denmark and to have this good company around us. It was a wonderful time for us as a family.

Honestly, I have to say it’s maybe kind of a Scandinavian thing to be so forward about the players becoming mothers — being a professional player, having kids and having a good support system around you, I think they really do it great. I was happy to be in Denmark at that time because they just supported everything we did. Sanna Solberg, she gave birth, I think, a few weeks before me, and I just saw how everything worked out with her pregnancy and with bringing the baby to training, to matches. The club just cared a lot about it — that we were feeling happy as a mum, as a player, that the kid was feeling happy. The rest of the countries can really make it a little better, I think. 

When I was playing in Germany, I always thought I would have to end my career before I could get pregnant. For me, there was no option to do it differently, because I didn't have anyone I could look up to because no one was doing it here in Germany. It was a thing that you can only have kids after your career. But then I moved to other countries and I saw a lot of other players, other cultures. I saw it was actually possible to do it. 

Of course, it's a lot of effort you need to put in, and a lot of planning. But I think it’s the best thing you can do — you have a lot of time for your kid and you can still play your favourite sport in a professional way. It's just right how I did it. 

I struggled a lot in the first year after giving birth. It is quite hard at the beginning to find your rhythm because you need to take care of a little baby. At the beginning, you really don't know what you're doing this moment. You're like, what the f***? You have so much responsibility and then in the evening, someone wants you to save 40 per cent of the balls. Your whole life is changing, and you need to find a way to put both together. 

It's easier to get your body back on track, I think, than your mental state. And then, after not playing handball for a year, you need to get used to it again. You need to get back to your routines for the matches. I struggled a lot with that — to get my routines and to get my playing style back. It took around a year.

I had really sleepless nights for some weeks in the beginning when I came back to Thüringer HC. After training one day my coach said, OK, tomorrow morning we have gym training at 9:00 am, and I was almost crying. I went to him and said, Herbert, I cannot do it. I cannot. I am not sleeping at all at the moment. I think if I do the gym training tomorrow I will just die and never stand up. So there are also hard times, but then you need to be honest to yourself, honest to your coaches. Just tell them you need support or you need something else. And it was never a problem in my surroundings.  

Coming back to Germany, to Thüringer, was nice for me. It was clear that if I go back to Germany, I will go to the club where everything started and I was really happy that it worked out to go there. I know the city. I know still some of the teammates. I know the coaches. So it was really like coming home and for me it was just nice to play those two years, the last two years of my career, here, and to enjoy the life here. 

It's a little bit calmer. You're playing the European League. You're not away every weekend from September on — that was important for me. I didn't want to be away every weekend. It was exactly the way I wanted it to be — perfect! 

My parents were one of the main reasons to go back to Germany after giving birth — just to have the possibility to have the family around. I really wanted my daughter to know her grandparents. It’s nice, but they're not too close so that they can just come over, you know, which is also good. They need to call before! 

I don’t have many thoughts about what’s coming next. I will just do a really big vacation over the summer — enjoy the free time, and not running in my free time, not going to the gym. I just want to have no pressure from that. After summer I will see what I will do, but I will remain at Thüringer as a goalkeeper coach, so that will be nice. I can care about the two young goalkeepers who will be next year in the goal. That's really something I love to do and I'm really looking forward to it. 

May 2025

Photos: kolektiff images; Christian Heilwagen; Metz Handball; HB Ludwigsburg