Žlto-modrá mašina zo severu zavádza v juniorke “overage”. “K mladým hráčom namiešame starších a bude to výborné.”

A boy from Bern who was not predicted to have a professional career I was born and directly raised in the capital of Switzerland, in Bern, which has over 130 thousand inhabitants. I remember my very first contact with ice quite well. My parents and I often went on holidays to the mountains in the Bernese Oberland (the alpine region of the canton and the northern side of the Bernese Alps, including many of the highest peaks). There, I skated on a natural ice surface for the first time with my mother. I also remember quite well that when I was six or seven years old, I went to a FC Bern’s soccer practice. But I didn’t like it there. Not long after, my friend from school went to an ice hockey practice and I joined him. This step became fateful for me. I was seven years old when I started playing for the SC Bern. It’s an extremely popular ice hockey club with the highest attendance in Europe. In addition to many nice experiences from my youth, one event stuck deep in my memory. When I was fourteen, my parents took me on a trip to San Francisco and we visited a game of the National Hockey League together. The home team was the rookie San Jose Sharks, and I don’t remember exactly who their opponent was, but I remember very well being excited at my first NHL game. It was my first tangible experience of the best league in the world. The arena, the fans and actually everything was fantastic. I didn’t mind at all that I was a die-hard Chicago Blackhawks fan until then. I cut out every report about this club from newspapers and watched the highlights on VHS tapes. Did I firmly decide after this experience that I wanted to play in the NHL? I had already known before what I wanted to achieve in life and it cannot be said that after this game I started to train even more or harder. However, this experience definitely inspired me even more. Although my father still claims that the game in San Jose was a “crap match” (laughs). I gradually passed through all the youth categories of