With 30 championship titles, KAC Klagenfurt are not only the most successful club in Austrian hockey history, but also one of the most decorated hockey teams worldwide. Despite that, they enter this year's Champions Hockey League looking to earn the respect of the sport's great powers.

by Luke Fisher

The Klagenfurter Athletiksport Club hockey team, commonly known as EC-KAC (or simply 'KAC'), comes from the town of Klagenfurt. Located in the south-Austrian province of Carinthia, the team is also the most successful ice hockey team in Austria with a total of 30 championship titles. For this reason, the team is often referred to as the Rekordmeister – record champions.

With 11 consecutive titles from 1964 to 1974 and four consecutive from 1985 to 1988, the KAC have undoubtedly been one of the most dominant forces in Austrian ice hockey over the past 50 years – however, the team's history dates back much further. Having been founded in 1909, EC-KAC joined the Austrian Ice Hockey Federation in 1926. Back then there were no uniforms, and hockey was played in gym shorts, soccer socks and football jerseys! In the 1933–34 season, EC-KAC won their first league title, putting an end to the domination of the Vienna Ice Skating Association. The Second World War interrupted play abruptly and post-war it took a long time to get the league back functioning properly in Austria.

Between 1952 and 1960, the KAC managed three further league titles in a period where Innsbruck EV were dominant in the Austrian Championship. With games still played outdoors and susceptible to inclement weather, on 22 November 1959, the Stadthalle Klagenfurt complex opened – the venue still used by the team today, albeit after several refurbishments over the years.

At the turn of the 1960s, helped by influential players such as Dieter Kalt Snr and Sepp Puschnig, the KAC began to take control of the Austrian Championship. From 1964 to 1980, Klagenfurt won the championship a staggering 15 times, with only ATSE Graz providing any real resistance. During these years the KAC also took part in several European Cups, starting in 1965–66 and then in 1966–67, where the team reached the semi-finals against ZLK Brno. In the 1968–69 season, they lost in the final to CSKA Moscow.

The team would then have to wait until the 90–91 season to lift another trophy, and it would be a further nine years before the Austrian Championship headed back to Carinthia after that – with Lars Bergstrom then delivering two titles in as many seasons. Jorma Siitarinen delivered another championship in 2003–04, before Manny Viveiros led the team to further success in 2009. The club's most recent title came in 2013, marching through the playoffs and winning the finals despite finishing fifth in the regular season.

The KAC qualified for this season's Champions Hockey League in somewhat strange fashion. After only making the playoffs in the last post-season position after the EBEL's Pick Round, they knocked out higher seeds Orli Znojmo in the quarter-finals to be the highest ranked team left in the playoffs not already qualified for the CHL. However despite this, under coach Doug Mason and with their phenomenal history behind them, the KAC are a big name club taking part this season, where success has become an expectation.

Team facts

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