With the first Monday in September a new series is starting on icehockey.hu in which those Hungarian clubs will be introduced that a youth system, first off is Győr and their number one person József Bartalis.
“This season we have reached a level with Győr having two ice surfaces, the larger rink was opened on August 20th which is a big deal, I don!t remember a time in the past thirty years in which there was ice in the month of August in Győr. Another important point is that we still have our smaller sized rink as well where we can work with a large number of beginners.” said the father of national team forward István Bartalis.
“I left Alba Volán in 1996 and moved to Győr to start coaching as well, the first super mini team that we had was made up of 10-12 kids among them Isti. From that point on I worked to develop and expand and thank goodness we have a large amount of kids who are playing hockey and from day by day we are having more and more kids sign up. I think in the future we will have someone on the national team that has come out of the Györ program.”
József Bartalis signed with Volán from Transylvania, since then he has been working in some ways or another for Hungarian ice hockey. We asked the club president how the organization is set up in Győr.
“The Györi EYO HC created the Győri Ice Sports Foundation, who runs and operates the ice rink, the funding that comes to this foundation is also what supports the Győr youth system.”
Hockey in Győr has taken large strides with József Bartalis in charge, but his work is not finished. “This season we finished the regulation sized rink as well as the locker room, the next step is to build an arena as well and from there we can restart the senior team as well. Its a restart since we had a respectable finish in the Hungarian league in 1997-98.”
Györi ETO HC currently has 178 kids in their youth system and they have a team in every age group except for the U20.