KalPa U20

Every U20 SM-sarja season for KalPa's junior side runs in the shadow of the Savon derby against Jukurit. The junior side has twice finished the season on top, in 2007–08 and again in 2017–18, and has come as close as second on two further occasions, most recently in 2021–22; a third-place finish in 2024–25.

Olli Jokinen came up through the Kuopio system, and Kasperi Kapanen out of the same junior ranks; Eetu Luostarinen and Teemu Hartikainen are more recent names on that list. What connects them is less a style of play than a pipeline that has kept working since the parent club took over Kuopio's hockey operations from KuPS in 1956, more than two decades after Kalevan Pallo itself had been founded, in 1929, as Sortavalan Palloseura on the other side of what was then the Finnish border.

The junior team shares its colours, black and yellow, and its home with the senior side at Olvi Areena, a rink that seats a little over 5,000 in a city where hockey, rather than the club's original football identity, has long since become the main business.