Jicin

The second leg of the 2013 Czech Cup final tells most of what needs to be told about HBC Jičín. Up against Cement Hranice, they had already lost the away game 22:27, then let a 26:25 home win slip through their fingers in the sense that mattered least — the aggregate still went the other way. It was the closest the club got to a domestic double, and it came in the same season, 2012/2013, in which they were crowned champions of the Czech Extraliga for the first time in their history, a season that also earned them a place in the EHF Cup, where they beat HC Dobrudja before Skjern Håndbold ended the run in the second qualifying round.

Jičín has built its reputation on what comes out of its own youth system rather than what it buys in, and the Extraliga title squad carried a generation raised through that academy — Tomáš Babák, Jan Vocásek, Tomáš Zeman, Jiří Drbohlav and David Machalický among them, several of whom went on to the Czech national team. A year later the club reached the Czech Cup final again, this time losing to Dukla Praha, and finished fifth in the league — a repeat of results already posted in 2005/2006, 2006/2007 and 2007/2008, evidence of a club that lives more often in the upper-middle of the table than at its summit.

The team formed in 1942 as a section of SK Jičín and only became its own entity, HBC Jičín, in 1997 — the same year František Štika helped push the club up into the Extraliga. Home games are played in front of blue and white, and the fiercest of them come against KH ISMM Kopřivnice and Pepino Házená Frýdek-Místek, with older rivalries against Náchod and Dvůr Králové still remembered as the Východočeské derby. The hall in Jičín holds 650 people.