And the HC Škoda Plzeň team will be led by a newly assembled coaching staff until the 2024/25 season. Josef Jandač became the head coach, his assistants will subsequently be Jiří Veber and Václav Pletka. Rudolf Pejchar remains the goalkeeper coach.
In the past two years, the Pilsen team was led by Petr Kořínek and František Bombic. They were then joined on the bench by Martin Straka, who will now act in the role of sports manager after the retirement of Tomáš Vlasák. However, after the last season, the club’s management decided that completely new coaches will be on the bench in the following season.
Josef Jandač, Jiří Veber and Václav Pletka became the new pilots of the Plzeň ferry.
“We are very happy that the negotiations came to a successful end. Josef Jandač is a very experienced coach, he already has several engagements in the Czech Republic, abroad, and last but not least also with the national team. We like his coaching philosophy, I believe he will help us in areas where we have had big problems now. Jiří Veber also has a lot of experience, which he has demonstrated in previous years. I firmly believe that together with Václav Pletka, their cooperation will be successful,” he says Martin Straka.
“We realize that after an unsuccessful season it was necessary to make changes. In addition to the new coaching staff, there is of course also the necessary strengthening of the players. I believe that all these steps will lead to the fact that we will play the kind of hockey that the fans will like, we will be successful and together it will take us a little higher again,” he added Magpie.
The new coaching staff has already been involved in building the squad for the upcoming season and continues to look for possible acquisitions to strengthen.
Josef Jandač was born in Beroun, where he also started playing hockey in the TJ Lokomotiva club. At the age of fourteen, he transferred to the juvenile unit Poldi SONP Kladno, but then returned to Beroun due to his studies. He made his debut in the senior league at the age of seventeen. Eight years later, when Beroun advanced to the first league, Josef Jandač was forced to end his playing career for health and family reasons.
The fifty-five-year-old coach began his coaching career in 1994 in an unusual way in faraway South Korea. The entire Seok Top Soul was able to lead to the championship title. This was followed by a move to the Bears of Beroun, where he gathered his first first league experience. Another return to South Korea came via Kralupy nad Jizerou. In 2001, Josef Jandač was chosen by the ambitious Liberec, with whom he was able to celebrate promotion to the extra league a year later. In 2004, he moved to the south of Bohemia, and with České Budějovice he celebrated his return to the elite, and later the extra-league bronze. He subsequently won third place with Pardubice.
From 2008 to 2010, he was an assistant to coach Vladimír Růžička with the national team. The team led by Růžička, Jandač and Weismann became the world champion in 2010. In 2011, his first stint on the bench of Sparta Prague followed. He completed the opening part of the 2012-13 season on the bench of Lva Praha in the Russian KHL, from where he returned to Sparta. With the Prague club, he already won his third extra-league bronze in 2014 and silver in 2016.
The peak of Jandač’s career was 2016, at the beginning of which he was elected head coach of the national team. The Czech team led at several world championships, the World Cup, and the 2018 Olympic Games in Sochi. The experienced coach then went on another foreign tour. He spent the entire full season in the ambitious KHL club Magnitogorsk, but was recalled after two rounds in the following season. In February 2020, he returned to Sparta’s bench, leading the Prague team together with Miroslav Hořava. Last season he took a break from hockey, now he is making a full comeback as head coach of the Pilsen team.
Fifty-five-year-old Jiří Veber was born in Prague, but he actively started playing hockey in central Bohemia in Kladno. In 1994, he also scored his first start in the highest competition here. Thanks to his good performances, his steps were subsequently directed to the north of Europe, he played two seasons in Finland, first in Tampere, a year later in Ässät Pori. This was followed by a move back to his native country, where he won four championship titles in five years in Vsetín. In the 2001/2002 season, he played for the then Keramika Plzeň. After a stint in Perm, an engagement in Litvínov followed, and he ended his career in 2005 in Beroun. As an excellent defender, he also won the national team jersey, he is the world champion in 1996 and the bronze medalist in 1997 and 1998.
Immediately after the end of his playing career, Veber started his coaching career. Through the youth in Jindřichov Hradec, he reached the A team. In 2007, he moved back to the youth, but already in Slavia Praha, where, among other things, he celebrated the championship title in the youth category. In 2013, he first appeared on the bench of an extra-league team as an assistant coach in Chomutov. This was followed by two seasons in exotic South Korea, where he headed the Anyang Halla team. And it was quite a successful season, he won silver in the first season, and even the title a year later. He then returned to the Czech Republic, first as an assistant in Sparta, in April 2019 he was appointed sports manager of Slavia. At the same time, he led the junior team and, from the 2020/2021 season, the A team. During last season, he joined the coaching staff of Vítkovic, from where he now headed to Pilsen. Jiří Veber also led the national team, in the years 2010-2013 he coached the under-17 team, then also the Czech under-18 team.
Václav Pletka is a native of Mladá Boleslav, where he also made his first start in adult hockey at the age of eighteen. He was subsequently noticed by coach Alois Hadamczik, who brought him to Třinec. In the extra-league season 1999/2000, he collected 49 points in 51 games in the Steelers’ jersey, which earned him a job overseas. However, he only played one game in two seasons with the Philadelphia Flyers. This was followed by a return to Třinec, from which in 2004 he headed to České Budějovice, which he helped to return to the elite. Three seasons followed in Liberec, then through Karlovy Vary, and a second anabasis in České Budějovice, he headed to Pilsen, where he managed to win the championship in the 2012/13 season. From the west of Bohemia, he headed to Prague’s Slavia. This was followed by stints in Kladno, Venátky nad Jizerou, and Litoměřice. He subsequently ended his rich career in Jičín, where, among other things, he already worked as a playing assistant coach.
Václav Pletka began to devote himself fully to coaching in the 2019/20 season, when he became an assistant coach at the youth team in Mladá Boleslav. In the following two seasons, he was already led as a head coach. In the season before last year, he started the season with the Bruslař junior team, but during the course of the year he was promoted to the A team, where he lasted until the end of this season. Now there is a new challenge for him, his steps are headed back to the west of Bohemia, where he celebrated the greatest success of his career.
2024-05-06 09:22:10
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