HAOLK

Promotion, if it comes, will leave HAOLK without a ground of its own. The men's side trains and plays out of the hall in Velká Bystřice, on Na Letné, but the building has no changing rooms attached to it, and the Extraliga will not accept that. The club has been looking instead at Andrův stadion in Olomouc, home to DHK Zora, where the new tribune and the seats beside the benches hold 600 people between them — a fallback still under discussion rather than a settled arrangement.

The academy behind HAOLK came together in 2020, when three local sides — HBC Olomouc 1966, Házená Velká Bystřice and TJ Sokol Centrum Haná — pooled their youth structures under one name. A senior men's team followed only in 2023, the same year the club took on its current identity: black, red and white, with a phoenix on the crest.

Two seasons later that team topped the 1. Liga mužů, finishing a single point above TJ Sokol Šťáhlavy, and has since gone into the play-off for a place in the Extraliga. Among the squad that got them there, goalkeeper Jakub Grulich has drawn attention for his part in the run; another academy product, Tomáš Vomáčka, had already moved on to SKKP Handball Brno by the time the title was won. Radek Flajsar coaches the side.

Without an Extraliga past of its own, HAOLK has no old rivalries to speak of — Šťáhlavy and TJ Rožnov pod Radhoštěm have simply been the teams standing in its way in the second tier. What stands in its way now is the play-off itself, and finding a hall that will let it stay up if it gets there.