Dübendorf

Three amateur titles across fourteen years, in 2004, 2014, and 2018, tell most of what Dübendorf's history has been since it dropped out of Nationalliga B: a club that stayed competitive at the level below the professional game rather than chasing a way back into it. The 2018 championship came with the MySports League crown as well, the only season the club has held both at once.

That drop happened in 1987, four years after Dübendorf had come within a playoff of Nationalliga A. Promotion to Nationalliga B in 1978 had been the high point of an earlier era; relegation nine years later ended it, and the club turned its attention to producing players rather than chasing them. Sven Andrighetto, Reto Berra, Leonardo Genoni and Pius Suter all passed through on the way to the National League and beyond, and the arrangement was formalised into a development partnership with the ZSC Lions.

Founded in 1939, the club plays at the Kunsteisbahn im Chreis, a rink holding 2,543. Seven numbers hang retired there, among them Lukas Stettler's #7 and Remo Trüb's #30, a list long enough to suggest a club that measures itself in decades rather than seasons. The most cited result of recent years came in the Swiss Cup in 2015, when Dübendorf beat Davos, then and now a National League club, 5:4 in overtime.

Fixtures against EHC Wetzikon and EHC Bülach, both a short drive away, are billed locally as the Zürcher Derby, and it is against that pair rather than any name from the top flight that Dübendorf's league form is actually judged. The club continues in the MySports League, still working from the same brief it set itself after 1987: hold its own at this level, and keep sending players up.