The game was played at that time with seven men; In addition to the known positions, there was also a so-called rover, who was the best ice skater on the course a kind of all-round player.

[3] In 1909, better training conditions were created with the opening of the first artificial ice rink, and the new sport experienced an unprecedented boom in Austria, which at that time was still part of the Austro-Hungary monarchy.

Only for season 1921/22 was the change from Bandy to Canadian ice hockey with the now-known puck of the association side.

However, this was in fact a competition limited to the Vienna area, and only gradually did teams from other parts of Austria join.

In 1931, the European title was brought to Austria again, and at the 1931 World Ice Hockey Championships, the team could achieve third place behind Canada and the United States.

At the 1931 Workers' Winter Olympiad in Mürzzuschlag occupied the national team of Austrians 1st place and became Olympic champion.

However, it followed a sporting crash, which meant that in 1962 Austria even relegated to the C-Group, but there unbeaten managed the immediate resurgence in the second division.

Other associations, such as the EC VSV, have been working with smaller budgets for quite some time to avoid the threat of bankruptcy.

Above all, the entry of Red Bull as a sponsor of the EC Red Bull Salzburg participant brought difficulties, as the team took a large part of the better athletic native players with extremely generous offers under contract and drove the salaries of Austrian players disproportionately upwards.

This is a very important aspect, especially after the temporary exit of HC Innsbruck, which has not left its mark on the formation of the second division.

While in Vorarlberg alone four (and with the newly added HC Innsbruck from the neighboring Tyrol five) national league teams existed, the East was dominated mainly by the Bundesliga clubs.

However, this led to the fact that the second-highest division was played over the years almost exclusively in the West, while the Bundesliga and Oberliga took place only in the East.

This problem was exacerbated with the growth of the league to Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia and could only be broken in 2012, when with the Dornbirner EC and returnees HC Innsbruck again two clubs from the West in the EBEL ascended.

Record champion and at the same time the oldest club in the current field is the EC KAC from Klagenfurt with 30 championship titles.

That this did not serve exclusively to push the high salaries for the comparatively small pool of Austrian players and thus to reduce the budgets, proved the temporary voluntary descent of the EBEL participant from Innsbruck.

In the 2009/10 season, the brand was exceeded for the first time by one million spectators, whereby the EBEL overtook the Slovakian Tipsport liga and was in seventh place in this ranking in Europe.

After some confusion about whether the National League could be held in the 2009/10 season at all, but still emerged in the end, a solution, but the development of recent years brought to an unsatisfactory endpoint.

The two Styrian representatives KSV ice hockey club and EV Zeltweg moved to the Oberliga, which meant that with the newly founded Zeller polar bears (successor of the insolvent EK Zell am See), the easternmost team of the second division was located in Salzburg.

Although this only happened because the actually worse placed Germans were set for the 2010 World Cup in their own country, the consequences were drawn from it, although here the association and the Bundesliga could not first agree on the responsibilities.

Instead, an attempt should be made to build up a new team over the next few years by intensifying the involvement of the youth players and to make their way into the 21st century.

The women's national team showed good performance at the World Cup Division I in Graz, but missed the rise but still clearly.

Above all, the senior men's team recently proved that in the training methods and the player selection crucial changes must be made.

For the ladies, the latest developments show that the path taken bears fruit, although there is still the fundamental problem that women's ice hockey in Austria is a pure amateur sport.