The Areopolis Floorball Association and the Black 69 Floorball Team are both from Romania, Harghita County, from the city of Odorheiu Secuiesc, which is one of the largest cities in the region, located in the heart of a mostly Hungarian populated area in Transylvania.

Please take a moment to read about a brief description of our floorball association’s past, present and future goals as well as the actual situation of floorball sport discipline in Romania.

We started to play floorball in 2009, involving a large group of friends, each of whom had a background career in fieldhockey. Fieldhockey used to be a successful sport discipline, especially in this part of Romania, but the unprofessional sports and faulty financial management on the league level from that time lead to an unfortunate and inevitable result: the fieldhockey almost ceased its existence in Romania.
Nevertheless, we intended to remain active in sports, because we have the respect for sportsmanship and the continuous need for practice, competition and the interest in promoting less known sport disciplines in this part of Romania. We started to play and promote floorball in our community with various generational groups (for young and adult likewise).

In 2013 we managed to establish our sports association with more than 25 active members. The members are of various cultural backgrounds, counting Hungarian, Romanian and even a Canadian ethnicity member.

The main target of our association and club is to promote a healthy and sporty lifestyle, and of course, floorball as a new sport discipline not only in our region, but in the whole of Romania as well. Even if we have only one year of existence, we already managed to implement several successful sports projects with our young association. We can point out the successful initiative for school kids named “School for the Young Floorballers”, and the “Breathe Healthy!” project started to encourage healthy lifestyle. Since 2009 we have organized several amateur floorball tournaments with at least three events each year. With the active involvement of our association we have reached in 2014 the 5th edition of the Rákóczi Floorball Cup and the 3rd editon of Transylvanian Floorball Cup with international floorball clubs among our contenders.

In the past 4 years we have been taking part in several amateur international floorball tournaments, mainly in Hungary with respectful results (reaching almost every time one of the first three places and earning several individual trophies as well – top scorers, best players and goalies).

In order to gain more success in promoting floorball, from 2015 we would like to extend our activity and start to work more intensely with school-aged children. We believe that this is the first step on the path for sustaining and developing a strong floorball club and for creating a high quality national floorball championship in Romania in the near future. After the first year of its existence the success of our initiative among local youngsters is immense. We strongly believe that the School for the Young Floorballers is a project for the future development of Romanian floorball. We already managed to work with children/scholars in 6 local schools which mean that we now have a group of almost 100 teenagers active in floorball. This is a success we have to build on.

Due to our efforts in order to make floorball a widely known sport discipline in Romania we contacted the International Floorball Federation. With the generous offer of Mr. Veli Halonen, the office and referee coordinator of the International Floorball Federation, we were able to obtain and put to good use floorball sticks and balls from the federation. Being sponsored by the IFF is a great achievement.

As you probably know, floorball is not yet an official sport discipline in Romania. Due to this lack of legal framework, we are facing several financing and sponsorship difficulties in Romania; we can hardly acquire financial help from the authorities and official sources in order to establish a proper foundation for our sport activity and floorball association.

With the extraordinary support of Mr. Benjamin Lüthi and the Unihockey für Strassenkinder Foundation, this year we managed to obtain the necessary rink for the development of the floorball sport discipline in this part of Romania.

If you are interested in sponsoring our floorball association at any of the levels you consider, please contact us to discuss the further details. In any case, I truly hope we can manage to create a mutually benefitting partnership between you and our team and association, a partnership which would lead to real results in showing the unique world of floorball to young people of our country.

In case of a well-founded mutual agreement for sponsorship/partnership, we would be proud to wear your name on our jerseys. In addition to its appearance on our uniforms, your name would also appear on our website (www.black69.ro, the website Black 69 Floorball Team of Odorheiu Secuiesc) and Facebook fan page. Furthermore, your name would be proudly displayed on a large banner outside the sports centre where we practice twice a week and organize our floorball tournaments.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Somogyi Attila,
areopolis.floorball@gmail.com

Project coordinator of the Areopolis Floorball Association
of Odorheiu Secuiesc

Csáki Gergely
Chairman of the Areopolis Floorball Association of Odorheiu Secuiesc