Passau

When the Black Hawks came within one step of folding, it was the fact that Patriching and the Wölfe agreed, on 23 December 1997, to stop competing against each other and merge into one club. The Patriching side gave up almost everything except its name, and Black Hawks Passau kept it on the shirt ever since.

The colours are black, red and white, and the club has needed all three tiers of German amateur hockey to prove itself. In 2012 it walked away from the Oberliga rather than convert its senior team into the GmbH structure the league demanded, and the drop to the Bezirksliga, six divisions down, followed. Getting back to the Oberliga by 2020 took the best part of a decade, and only after the 2023–24 season did the club finally set up the Spielbetriebs GmbH it had once refused to form.

The high point in between came in 2007, when the Bayernliga title was won and promotion to the Oberliga secured with it. A Bavarian Cup and a pair of Landesliga and Bezirksliga championships fill out the cabinet, modest by design for a team whose home, the Eishalle Passau, holds 1,500 people and gives most of them nowhere to sit.

Twice a season the rivalry with Deggendorfer SC turns the Eishalle into something closer to full: the two towns sit close enough on the map that the fixture has its own name, the Oberpfalz/Passau derby, and its own rules that owe nothing to where either side stands in the table.

Younger players still arrive through ESV Waldkirchen and the Vilshofener Wölfe, feeding a first team that has spent its history proving it belongs a level higher than the one it is currently playing.