Oulun Kärpät is an ice hockey team from the city of Oulu. You can read more about the team on their home page at www.oulunkarpat.fi/english.php. The non-obvious part of the name – Kärppä (plural Kärpät) – comes from a small predatory mammal called an ermine, a weasel, or a stoat in English.

Etelä-Suomen Kärppäfanit ry stands for Kärpät Fan Club of Southern Finland. The short form of the fanclub is Etäkärpät which could be translated as remote-weasels. The abbreviated form comes from the fact that we are mainly located in Helsinki, over 600 km from the city of Oulu. However, we’ve been constantly spreading to other Southern Finland cities as well, and especially in Tampere we have a strong division.

EtäKärpät was founded in September 2004 after the previous fan club was abolished. Some members of the old fan club wanted to continue supporting Kärpät as a registered association, so EtäKärpät was born.

The main purpose of the fan club is to support the Oulun Kärpät ice hockey team. Other purposes are contributing to proper fan culture and awakening some old-fashion sportsmanship in the spectator stands. We believe that you should have fun during a hockey game. We support our own team but we also respect the opposing team. You could call us roligans, which is an original Danish term contrary to hooliganism.

At the time of writing we have over 300 members, which makes us the largest Finnish ice hockey fan club that’s not located in the team’s hometown.

Our main activities are naturally games where Oulun Kärpät play in the capital city region and elsewhere in Southern Finland, namely those against Jokerit, HIFK, and Blues in the Helsinki region and Tappara, Ilves, and HPK in the Tampere/Hämeenlinna region. Turku is also seeing more and more activity, so there aren’t many rinks where Kärpät don’t get a strong support also in their away games. During weekends we often arrange bus trips to Kärpät games also in more remote locations such as Lappeenranta or Kuopio, not to forget the home arena in Oulu. As almost all of our members have at some point lived in the Oulu region, it is always pleasant to visit the Good Old North. We also have parties to celebrate the start and the end of a season and whenever Kärpät play somewhere outside Finland, we’ll do our best to be there as well.

If you are interested in ice hockey and Kärpät is the team for you, you are warmly welcome to get to know us and find out what this is all about. You can contact us by e-mail at Sähköpostiosoite on suojattu roskapostiohjelmia vastaan, Javascript-tuen tulee olla päällä nähdäksesi osoitteen . If you’re interested in joining us, the membership fee has been 20 euros for a few seasons now. Having a good attitude and sense of humor is essential as we are most often supporting the away team in our relatively small (on some occasions not even that small, for the current record is almost 500 Kärpät fans in a single game) but loud group. However, that’s part of the fun ;)