# From Merano to Thirteen Winters in White and Red: Daniel Frank's Bolzano Goodbye

**By Petra Nowak**  \nPublished July 27, 2026  \nUpdated July 27, 2026

> The Merano native arrived in 2013 with the club's first EBEL season and leaves as one of the most decorated captains in the Foxes' recent history.

When Daniel Frank skated onto the ice for HC Bolzano in the autumn of 2013, he was a teenager, freshly promoted from the Red Bull Academy and Kaufbeuren youth systems, and the youngest forward in a squad about to test itself in a competition it had never played before. Bolzano's debut season in the EBEL — the cross-border league that would eventually be rebranded as the ICE Hockey League — doubled as Frank's professional apprenticeship, and the first lesson the teenager from Merano learned was the sweetest one. Bolzano won the title in 2013/14, and Frank's name went onto the Karl Nedwed Trophy in his very first campaign.

Thirteen winters later, that apprenticeship has ended. The club confirmed in July 2026 that Frank will not be part of the roster for 2026/27, closing a chapter that no one at the Sparkasse Arena had quite imagined when he was still a wide-eyed rookie learning the bench dynamics of a senior team. Across those thirteen seasons, Frank accumulated 714 appearances and 166 points in white and red, claimed a second league title in 2017/18, skated in two more finals his team did not win, and represented the club in four editions of the Champions Hockey League. He wore the "A" of alternate before inheriting the "C" in 2022, matching a club milestone of long service associated with the previous captain, Anton Bernard.

## The Season That Made Him Smile and the One That Tried to Break Him

Frank's career has rarely been a smooth upward curve. It has been a series of plateaus, surges and setbacks, all of which the Bolzano public has watched from close range. The 2023/24 campaign was, by his own subsequent account, the most rewarding of his career: eleven goals across regular season, playoffs and the Champions Hockey League — one more than his previous high set in 2020/21 — and eleven assists to go with them. Two nights in particular stand out in the club's recent memory. On 28 December, in Asiago, he registered four assists in a single game. Less than two weeks later, on 9 January at Fehérvár, he scored the first hat-trick of his career.

The following season nearly undid him. An injury, which Frank has described as the most difficult stretch of his career, cut into his 2024/25 availability and forced the thirty-year-old to confront a question he had never really had to ask: what did he have left in the tank? The answer came in the summer of 2025, when the club renewed his contract for a thirteenth season. By that point he had already reached 657 appearances in white and red, with Stefan Zisser's all-time benchmark of 685 still in sight. Frank framed the renewal in characteristically blunt terms: every drop of sweat left on the ice, no compromises — a paraphrase of the Italian he has used to describe the standard he demands of himself and his teammates.

## The Blue Shirt and the White and Red

Frank's standing inside the Bolzano dressing room has always been amplified by what he has done elsewhere. He has worn the blue of Italy ninety-two times, serving both as captain and as an alternate, and has played in three IIHF World Championship tournaments at the top division and one in Division I Group A. The most recent of those, contested at the Sparkasse Arena in Bolzano itself in the spring of 2024, saw him named one of the three best Italian players at the tournament after a five-game run that produced three goals and two assists in front of his own supporters.

For Bolzano, the question now is structural. The 2026/27 roster will be the first in over a decade to plan its identity without a player who learned the club's system the season it first entered the EBEL. The championships Frank helped deliver — 2013/14 and 2017/18 — are the kind of memories that resist easy substitution. So, in their own quieter way, are the December night in Asiago and the January afternoon in Fehérvár, the two milestones that together made 2023/24 the year Frank reminded South Tyrol what a peak version of him looked like. Whoever next pulls the white and red over his head will be walking into a space that a Merano teenager, with a little help from Red Bull and Kaufbeuren, spent thirteen years learning how to fill.

## Sources

- [Carlo Cecino](https://corrieredellaltoadige.corriere.it/notizie/sport/26_luglio_18/hockey-daniel-frank-dice-addio-ai-foxes-vissuto-stagioni-straordinarie-vestire-la-maglia-di-bolzano-e-stato-un-onore-c0ea1b5c-c30d-440e-b44e-2aebd0ad6xlk.shtml) — original
- [Autore](https://hockeywords.com/capitan-daniel-frank-fa-13-con-il-bolzano/) — original
- [Luca Tommasini](https://www.hcb.net/it/capitan-daniel-frank-alla-dodicesima-stagione-a-bolzano/) — original
- [Marco De Angelis](https://radionbc.it/hockey-daniel-frank-dice-addio-al-bolzano/) — original
- [tv33.it](https://www.tv33.it/news/hockey-su-ghiaccio-il-capitano-daniel-frank-dice-addio-al-bolzano) — original