Pribram

Hockey in Příbram goes back to a group that put together LK Příbram in 1933, a club that spent much of the following decades being folded into whatever local sports structure was in fashion — Sokol, Baník, the army club VTJ — collecting and shedding names with each merger until it settled on HC Příbram, and later HC Baník Příbram, in 2021. The men's side still carries that patched-together history: it plays in the second tier, its dressing room built around a captain, Petr Kafka, who came up through the Extraliga at Sparta Praha, Kladno and Slavia Praha before landing back home.

What actually built the club's name happened somewhere else entirely. In 2018 Příbram took over Slavia Praha's licence in the Extraliga ženského hokeje and installed a women's team that has barely lost a step since — champions in 2018/19, champions again the following season after the pandemic cut the schedule short, then champions in each of the last three years running. Six titles in six seasons under one badge is not something the town's ice stadium, holding 4,200 for a men's second-division fixture, was built to expect.

The rink still carries green and black, the colours attached to the "Hammers" nickname, on both sides of the operation. But it is worth remembering that the whole thing traces back to a handful of people in 1933 who had nothing more than a name and a idea to skate under it.