Vimmerby HC

Kalmar HC and Tranås AIF sit closest on the map. Vimmerby HC grew out of a gap: the ice hockey section of Vimmerby IF had folded after slipping out of Division II in the early 1970s, and it took until 1993 for the town to field a club under its own name again.

The Tigers, as they're known locally, spent much of the following decades working their way back up through the lower divisions. Winning the qualification series in Division 2 B in 2011 took them into Division 1, and in 2024 the club won the Kvalserien AS qualification series and reached HockeyAllsvenskan for the first time in its history — the second tier of Swedish hockey.

Linus Hultström came up through the club's youth ranks before a career that took him through Linköping, Leksand and Djurgården in the SHL and on into the NHL, KHL and NL, and eventually onto Sweden's Olympic roster in 2022. Thomas Rundqvist, later a world champion, also passed through as a junior. The 2024 promotion squad had its own contributors, Eddie Levin and Carl Sjöberg among them, in a campaign that finally got the club over a line it had been chasing for years.

Home games are played in front of 1,750 at VBO Arena, where the black and white shirts and the Tigerklubben supporters have watched the club climb from a standing start. But it's the trips to Kalmar and to Tranås that still draw the sharpest edge.