VK Liberec Women

Liberec sits in a corner of Bohemia better known for glassmaking and its hillside tram than for team sport. The club's roots lie far from the city: it began life in Prague in 1948 under the army's colours, first as ATK Praha, then ÚDA Praha, then Dukla Praha, and it was only in 1969 that the team moved to Liberec and made the town its own.

The name Dukla stayed, and so did the habit of winning. Under Czechoslovakia the club took the national championship fourteen times, a run that belongs to an era and a federation that no longer exist, and in 1976 it reached further still, beating the rest of Europe to the CEV European Champions Cup. Since the split of Czechoslovakia, the Extraliga titles have come in smaller, harder-won clusters: 2001 and 2003, then a gap before 2015 and 2016, and a fifth in 2021. The Czech Cup has been the more regular habit, collected ten times since the mid-1990s.

Veronika Trnková's name still carries the most weight in Liberec when older supporters talk about who the best to play in red and yellow was; the middle blocker is remembered as the standard against which the club measures itself. The current side plays behind Lucie Kolářová's captaincy, in a hall that holds 1,200, modest by Extraliga standards but full often enough to matter on cup nights, when the crowd noise does the work a bigger budget might elsewhere.

Dukla Liberec goes into the current Extraliga season carrying that cup pedigree rather than a fresh league title, chasing another run at the competition where its recent history has been written most often.