Pictures: Slovakia National Team U-18 project with HDC Slovakia

We are proud of the young Slovakia national team who managed to take an honorable 4th place at the Ice Hockey World Championship U18, held in Switzerland. In the match for 3rd place, the teams of Slovakia and Canada showed relatively equal hockey, moreover, only one minute separated the Slovakian team from the coveted bronze medals. Everything was decided by a goal during the final assault on the Canadians, who were already playing without a goalkeeper. In overtime, luck was already on the side of Canada. For a more complete understanding of this success, one should note such an interesting fact that in Slovakia there are 4 times fewer registered hockey players for the whole country than in the city of Edmonton alone.

It should also be emphasized that in the course of the tournament, Slovakia passed the favorites of the tournament, the Finland team. Needless to say that in the group they also got ahead of the Czech Republic. This, coupled with the final place, gives the right to very positively assess both the outcome of the tournament itself and the younger generation that is growing up to replace the current national team players.

For us, an important success factor is also the fact that the coaches of the U-18 national team were once connected with our training methodology. Judge for yourself, the head coach of the team Tibor Tartal some time ago was a coach in the HDC project, where we, as part of a pilot project, worked for a whole season on the development of the junior team.

Many well-known professional players who now play in the NHL (for example, Fehérváry and Ružička) or in other foreign professional leagues (Liška, Buček, Krivošík, Húska, Valent, ...) came out of this project.

In addition to the head coach, Michal Dostal, our former coach and director of the hockey center, and now an assistant coach in the U-18 team, was also working in HDC Slovakia. Also in the structure of the national team is our former physical coach. Milan Kabat. Thus, our understanding of the training methodology and the correct training process is put into practice and bears fruit.

Congratulations to Slovakia on this outstanding result and we are optimistic about the future, which is becoming more and more promising for the young guys from this amazing team.