How come so many in the Swiss System? What is the link / backstory
The father of the modern Lithuanian hockey program is Bernd Haake who has been involved with Lithuanian hockey, mostly as the HC of the National Team but he held a variety of other roles and even more unofficially without holding a title, from 2012 to 2023. In the earlier years of involvement, he was the most influential figure in Lithuanian hockey who both brought an outsider's perspective to why we suck and provided the energy, know-how, and the means to move Lithuanian hockey forward according to his vision.
So one of his key ideas was to get the kids out of Lithuania in their early teens because by the time they were looking to leave to play junior hockey, they had already wasted most important years of their development playing in an uncompetitive environment. So parents, and the Lithuanian hockey community as a whole, started looking at places that would enable such a hockey route via foster parenting and all other required prerequisites for, well, basically growing somebody else's kid.
One of the trailblazers in this was Emilijus Krakauskas (his youngest brother still played for this U20 team this year) - who was later one really bad injury away from becoming a legitimate NL player - who left for Switzerland in 2012 partially because his parents lived in Kretinga, a small Lithuanian town where the closest hockey rink was in Liepaja, Latvia, 86 kilometers away. The kid had obvious hockey talent so they decided they might as well ship him to Switzerland if he is going to have to live away from home regardless going forward.
Everything went well for him and the process gained traction both ways - it was shown it was possible to raise a hockey player away from home and the Swiss clubs too saw there was nothing to lose and something to gain in this situation. Switzerland is in relatively close proximity, a rich country with a multi-national society, nice people, and a strong hockey pyramid. These factors don't align quite as well in any other country with Sweden probably being the second closest.
So over the last 12 years and counting the contingent of Lithuanians in Switzerland grew more and more since that's really how diaspora works in general. It was even easier to move to Switzerland when you are going to have Lithuanian teammates to interact with there and Lithuania grew richer for more people to afford this route, or raising a hockey kid in general.
And so it is what it is today, we have close to 15 Lithuanian kids playing in the Swiss U20s and U17s alone which is almost enough to fill out the entire team roster.
Frankly, Sweden isn't lagging too far behind either, just that Switzerland has had the most talented kids so far. Mykolas Skadauskas, however, might soon draw more light to Sweden as well since he left Dovydas Jukna - our supposedly 2nd best prospect - in the dust in terms of scoring (12 points versus 7) despite being 8 months younger.
