Kulager

Petropavl had never had a hockey club of its own until a group of local enthusiasts put one together in the spring of 2015, giving the city on the Kazakh-Russian border a team named after Kulager, the horse from Ilyas Zhansugurov's poem. Vyacheslav Belan took the bench as the first head coach and, in a debut campaign that gave the club no time to settle, brought Kulager a bronze medal in the 2015-16 Kazakhstan Hockey Championship — still their best league finish.

The Kazakhstan Cup has been kinder. Kulager won it in successive seasons, 2016-17 and 2017-18, and returned to the final in 2019-20, this time finishing runners-up. Ilya Akhmetov scored the winning goal in the 2016 final and went on to captain the side in 2022-23, later named the championship's best forward; in goal, Andrei Yankov was picked out as the tournament's best goalkeeper in both 2016 and 2019. Ilgiz Nuriyev wore the captain's armband from 2017 to 2020 before returning to the club as head coach in 2023-24.

Every meeting with HC Arlan of Kokshetau is billed locally as the Northern Derby, the closest thing Kulager have to a rivalry, the two clubs separated by little more than 250 kilometres of steppe.

Kulager play in blue and white at the Alexander Vinokurov Sports Palace, a rink that holds 1,000 for a city where, for a decade now, it has been the only place to watch top-level hockey.