HC Zubří

The ROBE Aréna in Zubří holds 1,200 people. That intimacy has mattered more than once: when the club reached the group stage of the EHF Champions League in 1997/98, and again in 2020/21, when it went further than ever before in Europe, to the quarter-finals of the EHF European Cup, the small hall behind ROBE stayed full and loud.

Handball had already taken root in Zubří by 1927, a year after the club's founding in 1926, and it took decades before the town's team belonged among the country's best. Promotion to the Czechoslovak First League came in 1960, but relegation in 1971 sent the club into a long stretch shuttling between the second tier and regional football. The turn came in 1991/92, when a group of former Soviet players arrived alongside coach Viktor Burcev and pushed Zubří back into the Czech Extraliga. Under Jiří Kekrt in the 1990s, with Jiří Mičola wearing the captain's armband, the club won back-to-back titles in 1996 and 1997. A third league title followed in 2011/12.

The Zubři, as the team is known after the bison on the town crest, have built continuity into the club as much as silverware: Jiří Mika worked his way from assistant to head coach while building up the youth academy, and his son Ondřej Mika now leads the first team.

No fixture carries more weight than the one against HCB Karviná. Billed as the Valašsko-Slezské derby, it draws the kind of intensity that ignores league position, and the sides met again in the 2025/26 semi-finals, Ondřej Mika's Zubří against Michal Brůna's Karviná.