Eisbären

Eisbären Zell am See grew out of a tennis and skating club founded on 28 December 1928 by Erich and Willi Schandlbauer, an engineer named Gross, and Otto Hainz, and it joined the Austrian Ice Hockey Federation the following year.

The club's history has not been a straight line. It was rebuilt after the war in 1946 under the name EK Zell am See, then went through bankruptcy in 1993, again in 1995, and a third time in 2009 after the death of its president, Otto Wittschier. Through it all, promotion to the top flight was something the club kept earning and kept turning down: it won the Austrian Second Division nine times, and twice, in 1989–90 and again after beating Red Bulls Salzburg in 2002–03, it chose to stay where it was rather than move up.

Thomas Vaněk came through the youth ranks here before his NHL career, and Walter Putnik's number 29 hangs retired in the arena. What the club had not done in nearly a century of second-tier titles and near-misses, it finally did in 2024–25: won the Alps Hockey League, the first Austrian team to take that title.