GKS Tychy defeated local rival GKS Katowice 4-2 in Game 7 of the Polish Hockey League finals on Monday.
Tychy and Katowice finished first and second in the PHL regular season. Tychy is a suburb of Katowice about 20 km away. Both cities are located in Silesia, which is Poland’s hockey hotbed, close to the Czech and Slovak borders.
It marks the second season in a row that Katowice has lost Game 7 of the finals.
Tychy includes four members of the Polish team at last year’s IIHF World Championship in nearby Ostrava, Czechia.
“I saw in the eyes of these guys that we were an incredibly close-knit team,” said veteran center Filip Komorski, the team captain. “We weren’t a group of players, we were a family. I wanted to do everything to lift this cup. We deserved it with hard work.”
Established in 1971, the Tychy hockey club previously won Polish championships in 2005, 2015, 2018 and 2019. Komorski has now been part of the team’s three most recent titles and defenseman Bartłomiej Pociecha, who has played for Tychy continuously since 2014, has won four.
“Gold is addictive,” the 33-year-old Pociecha said. “We wanted to win and we worked hard for it every day. Before the start of each season we feel the hunger for victory, but this year it was even greater. We knew we were capable of it, because we were aware of what kind of team we have.”
As Polish champion, Tychy has qualified for the 2025-26 Champions Hockey League season. Tychy one one game in each of its two previous CHL appearances. Last year’s Polish champion, Unia Oświęcim, won twice and missed advancing to the round of 16 on a tiebreaker.
Oświęcim wins Polish title in 7th game OT
The seventh and decisive game of the Polish Hockey League finals between GKS Katowice and Unia Oświęcim was scoreless after regulation time, but in the seventh minute of overtime, Lithuanian winger Mark Kaleinikovas delivered the title-winning goal for visiting Oświęcim.