Junior Players Will Be Part of the New Series

The bronze-medal “icing on the cake” achieved by the senior national team at the World Championship in Finland should not overshadow the many other important successes Czech hockey enjoyed during the 2021/22 season. This year’s series will therefore also introduce collectors and hockey fans to players from the Czech women’s national team. The team had already delighted Czech fans during Olympic qualification and then even more at the Olympic tournament itself, where its historic first qualification for the Winter Games was followed by a place in the quarter-finals. A brave performance against the heavily favoured and eventual silver-medal-winning United States underlined what an excellent tournament the Czech women had played.

Although the 2021/22 season may seem to be in the past, the unusual Covid period meant that the traditionally New Year’s tournament featuring the world’s best junior teams had to be moved to an unusual summer date that would normally belong to the 2022/23 hockey season. Nevertheless – or perhaps precisely because of this – we are including players from this tournament in this year’s series as well.

On Monday, we visited our junior national-team players at their pre-tournament camp in Brno’s Lužánky to obtain autographs for the 2021/22 season cards. After all, by taking part in a second staging of the World Junior Championship, they had already become part of hockey history.

For many of our young national-team players, this is a pivotal season and, in fact, a pivotal summer. For those who spent the season in North America, the summer also means preparing for demanding school responsibilities, exams and, for some, even final school-leaving examinations. For the oldest players, who have already been successfully drafted and may be preparing for their first NHL season, it is certainly not easy to devote themselves fully to national-team duties. That makes it all the more important to appreciate those who nevertheless came to the national-team camp to represent Czech hockey with pride at this unusual time of year. Hopefully, their desire to represent their country will remain just as strong in the years ahead.

At the meeting itself, we had the opportunity to get to know eight young Czech national-team players more closely – future sporting idols for the next generation. Standa Svozil, Jirka Kulich, David Jiříček, Míša Gut, Honza Bednář, Martin Ryšavý, Kuba Kos and Ivan Ivan had a chance to experience that role already. A group of young boys, perhaps attending their first pre-season training camp, noticed us in the dressing room. At first, our national-team players were mostly joking around, signing and trading cards with one another. But once the first shy young “fan” came over for a card, the joking stopped and the dressing room suddenly filled with children. In an instant, the promising juniors became professionals who realised that even a signature on a trading card might influence the hockey dreams of a young boy who already sees them, at the very beginning of their professional careers, as major sporting idols he hopes to emulate one day.

We wish our junior national-team players not only a successful conclusion to this unusual season, but above all a successful start to their future professional careers.