UK Prague

Michal Broš won gold with the Czech national team at the 2000 World Championship, and these days he stands behind the bench of a university side that carries his old shirt colour, dark blue with red trim, onto the ice at ŠKODA ICERINK in Prague-Strašnice. The team he coaches belongs to Charles University, and everyone in Prague hockey circles calls it by one word rather than its full name: Karlovka, a nod to Karlova, the university's own name.

The club plays in the University Hockey League, but its reputation was built earlier, in the European University Hockey League, where Karlovka took the title four years running, from 2014 to 2017. That run overlapped with another one closer to home: the Hokejová Bitva, a battle contested against other Czech university sides, which Karlovka won six times between 2011 and 2017. The two streaks fed each other — a team already used to winning at home travelled better, and a team winning abroad came back hungrier for the domestic fight.

2017 stands apart in the club's run of results. That year Karlovka added the Souboj mistrů, a meeting of champions, to the EUHL title already in hand, and then went to Yekaterinburg for the Eurochallenge and came home with bronze — the furthest the team is known to have travelled for a result. Since then the EUHL run has not been repeated, and the club's story now rests on the Hokejová Bitva rivalry and on Broš, still shaping the team he once played international hockey ahead of.