A local hockey club Vítkovice and the EVRAZ foundation joined to fund, equip and train a team of boys with special needs or from disadvantaged background. The aim was to allow them to try out an attractive sport (the tradition of ice hockey is very strong in Ostrava), pursue a meaningful passtime and develop their soft skills by following an exacting schedule of training and respecting authority and experience a very compelling and rewarding sense of team play and sport success.
Several of our boys joined the team.
Dominik (16):
"The training starts at half past two and ends at half past four every Monday and Wednesday. When we arrive to the CEZ aren, we wait for our coach and we follow him to the locker room. We change there into the hockey gear a then we go to the bench and wait until our coach lets us embark on ice surface. Half of us has red jerseys and the other half has blue jerseys. First we skate then we do different exercises - skating back, doing various turns and keeping discs around cones and even oversteps, At the end of training, we play hockey against each other either in full or half the ice ring."
