The hockey club from Kherson will continue to play next season
Head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration Alexander Prokudin talked about the future hockey club Dnepr. He is confident that the team will continue to perform next season, despite some problems with financing.
“We are looking for an opportunity to finance the club from the regional budget. Before the full-scale war, funding was 40 million hryvnia per year. In 2022, 8 million; this season, 8 million hryvnia were also spent. Next season it will not be possible to allocate such an amount. But we finance player salaries and some pre-season training camps. Hockey players receive a minimum salary of 7,100 hryvnia. In turn, the club itself works with sponsors and uses sponsorship funds to buy equipment and add to the hockey players’ salaries. So the club’s total budget should be 12-13 million hryvnia,” Prokudin said.
“We understand that leading players, if conditions worsen, will not stay in the team. The team has four hockey players who are called up to the Ukrainian national team. We will try to give sports scholarships to these leading players, including our national team goalkeeper Eduard Zakharchenko.”
“Now there is no handball Dnepryanka, there is no futsal club, as there was before. Therefore, we don’t even have a thought to stop the activities of the Dnieper.”
In the 2023/24 season, Dnepr was based in Odessa. In the regular championship of the Favbet-league, the team took third place, and in the semi-finals of the playoffs they lost to Kremenchuk in a dramatic confrontation (the series score was 3:4).
Last week, the players and management of HC Dnepr received bronze awards in the Favbet League for the 2023/24 season. The team visited their native Kherson, where the award ceremony took place.
Source: Sportarena
I’m Emma Smith, a dedicated journalist and avid storyteller. I have been writing for news websites for the past 5 years, reporting on hockey news and delivering in-depth analysis of the sport. In my current role as Author at Athletistic, I write about hockey events from around the world to keep followers up-to-date with what’s happening in the sport.
