Benk: I hope to play another 9 season

2016.08.06. 18:29 |

Just as the summer is finishing up and the hockey training camps the final national team transfers are coming in.  After nine seasons in Fehérvár AV19 long time national team forward András Benk is moving on to MOL League club UTE.

With everyone opening up training camp for the season András Benk announced he is going to spend the upcoming season with UTE, a club that he had spent a couple of seasons playing in their youth system. Benk talked to icehockey.hu about his decision to switch clubs and how they plan using him.

How did the idea of moving on to the next stage of your career come?
Negotiations with Fehérvár did not go as planned, I had planned nine season in pretty much the same role and I feel that I can be more of a point scorer in another league. I hope still have another 9 seasons in me and possibly in this new role.

What made you decided to go to the MOL League and within that join UTE?
We can all see how much the league has improved and we noticed in Fehérvár any time we played a MOL League club how strong they were. I was not really planning on going abroad because of my family because of this the MOL League was always the next stop. Multiple teams were interested in me but I really liked what UTE had told me and what had planned for the upcoming season. I think we can have great season.

Did head coach Zoltán Szilassy tell you what he expected from you both on and off the ice?
He is expecting me to bring my experience to the team and also I will be playing in a more of a goal scoring role, play special teams, which was something I didn’t really do in the past. Hope fully I will be able to open up and score more like I did when I was younger.

You played a couple seasons in UTE when you were young on the old open air arena, what do you remember from that?
I started playing hockey in Dunaújváros, but after a couple seasons I moved to Újpest because we lived right next to Budapest. Yes I played on that open air arena, if it rained we had to remove the rainwater and if it snowed we had to clear the snow. There was always that ammonia smell that I’m sure a number of people who know what I am talking about. I do have a lot of great memories playing in UTE as a kid since I was also able to play in one team with my older brother.

In the MOL League you played a only a couple of games in the previous incarnation of the Fehérvár farm team how much has the league changed and what do you expect from the league?
Like I said before that the league has improved the last couple of seasons and there were games when we played against teams from the league that really gave us a hard time or even beat us. This is great for Hungarian hockey that there are better and better players and the teams are constantly improving as well. We saw during the national team camp we had almost 80 players invited, which would not have happened a couple years earlier.