Zurich Reborn: Aneta Cornová’s Story of Resilience

Aneta Cornová with Slavia Prague as a youth player

During this Fall’s Zurich afternoons, the rink lights hum and the drills look routine, until you watch #21 taking her reps with a grin that won’t quit. Defender Aneta Cornová, born in Mělník, Czechia, has every reason to treat warm-ups like a minor miracle. After more than a season lost to debilitating back injury and a medical odyssey she wouldn’t wish on anyone, she’s skating real shifts again for Zürich’s GCK Lions Frauen in Switzerland’s second tier.

Cornová grew up in Czech hockey youth programs. She started her career at Slavia Praha (a decision that surely was controversial growing up in a family full of Sparta Prague fans), alongside familiar star players (such as SDHL and former PWHL player Dominika Lásková and PWHL Vancouver’s Tereza Vanišová). She would win the Czech domestic league on four different occasions with Slavia, gathering attention in the national team setup. She would go on to play on the U18 national team where she scored at the 2017 IIHF U18 Women’s Worlds. Eventually she graduated to senior camps and games with the Czech National team over the 2015–16 and 2017–18 seasons. Those reps and experiences made her fluent in hard minutes and travel-days across nations.

Aneta alongside her Slavia teammates during one of their four Women’s Extraliga championships.

As her game matured, she eyed a move abroad, seeking newer and tougher challenges outside of Czechia at a time when the domestic league was still more developmental than professional. Russia once seemed like the obvious leap for European players, but geopolitics closed that door. Switzerland opened a different one. Through a Czech coaching contact, the process was quick: call, interview, tryout, offer: Zürich. She joined the ZSC/GCK Lions system, bouncing between the top flight and SWHL-B, and later logged two seasons with SC Langenthal Damen, even helping in their 2022 promotion series with a late clincher. “Six years ago it was much different here,” she told me. “Now it’s a different league. The resources, quality of life, and the level have all improved so much here in Switzerland!”

Zürich fit off the ice too. Like many women’s players, she balanced hockey with work, running a part-time cleaning business, while building a life in Switzerland. She and her then-boyfriend (now husband) first met at a street-hockey tournament back home in Czechia, but she eventually got him to adopt Zurich too as they rooted themselves in the city, committing themselves long-term to making it work in their new home. A beautiful new country, mountain air, a fantastic organization, supportive teammates. It was a dream progression in life for the young hockey player.

Then came the bill…

Cornová with Zurich

Despite the exciting challenge of playing in an up and coming, rapidly developing league, Cornová trained through creeping pain. CrossFit, any extra skates she could get outside of normal practice, no real off switch, until one day a simple warm-up left her on the ground with her legs refusing orders. A scary moment in which her back, overwhelmed with pain and failure, left her thinking something was seriously wrong. Over-training and stress taking its toll, hospital visits followed. Almost overnight, she found herself in her mid-20’s and staring at surgical recommendations she desperately wanted to avoid. However, Aneta chose to go the route that would potentially combat the pain and inflammation best, but wasn’t a sure fix - steroid spine injections. A decision that while mildly painful, Aneta assumed would be the best to go through with. But another obstacle blocked her path, severe allergic reactions: fever spikes, vomiting, another terrifying collapse at home, and a frantic trip back to the hospital. “I wanted to give up, I became depressed, I remember feeling I just want to die,” she remembers thinking in that worst moment.

A Zurich specialist switched her to platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections. In theory, the treatment is elegantly simple: the doctor draws a vial of the athlete’s own blood, spins it in a centrifuge for about ten minutes, and siphons off the pale-gold layer teeming with platelets cells that normally rush to a cut and release a cocktail of growth factors. That super-charged plasma is then injected, often under ultrasound guidance, directly into battered tendons or cartilage where it’s supposed to kick-start recovery. The whole appointment rarely takes an hour, and most patients walk out with nothing worse than a dull ache.

Cornová with Zurich

Her experience was the outlier. The first shot, just before Christmas 2024, backfired hard: post-injection inflammation ballooned into temporary partial paralysis, leaving her reliant on family just to get to the bathroom—the kind of bleak chapter you don’t post about. PRP complications this dramatic are rare, but they do happen when swelling compresses nearby nerves or when the needle traumatically irritates already-angry tissue. Instead of the promised leap forward, she spent the holidays immobilized, wondering whether the gamble on a cutting-edge fix had pushed her further from the starting line.

Ten days later, luckily, the symptoms receded. Slowly, over time the PRP started to work. The pain never vanished, but it became negotiable, something she could manage while deferring any surgery until after her career.

Yet, despite the stable slow progress, she shut down. She tried to stage her own goodbye to hockey assuming that regardless of the outcome of the injections, her athletic career was over. “…if it’s over, let me choose it, I wanted to do it on my own terms”. But the stubborn part of her brain refused. After seeing a advertisement for a group of women participating in what she called a ‘health marathon’, she decided she wouldn’t go down without a final fight. Over the next weeks and months she focused on mental work that went into recovery, and listened when Zürich teammates and coaches told her they were all-in on a comeback. The lessons were unglamorous for someone like her whose work ethic knew nothing but going full speed: rest is training, limits are information, and joy is a skill.

She eased back into CrossFit, running (running and completing the ‘health marathon’), and even worked up to skating with guardrails. The target was simple for her: she just wanted to play hockey again.

Eventually, through the discipline of patience and consistency, Aneta was able to participate in an early season tournament at the beginning of this season. The first game back wasn’t pretty for her team, a bad loss, but for her? “Honestly, it was the best game of my life,” she laughed, fully aware her team didn’t play particularly well. “You don’t understand, I was just so happy. Happy to be back on the ice, happy to be competing. It was so great also seeing my teammates be so supportive. Even though we lost, I think they knew what that game meant to me.” That’s what a near-miss to never walking again does to your perspective: practice is a privilege, and something like a bad loss or bag skating becomes a love language.

September brought a small, loud success in a preseason tournament: Cornová opened the scoring and the Lions went on to the final. She grinned later about how different the game pace felt compared to practices “I forgot how hard it is to actually play hockey, I was so out of shape!”, but the scoreboard didn’t care. Neither did her teammates.

Context matters here and is important to understand: GCK Lions Frauen are Zürich’s SWHL-B side, the development-and-contender hybrid that keeps the city’s player pipeline humming. The organization has grown alongside the Swiss women’s game, which has quietly transformed in recent years, more imports, better resources, higher standards. Cornová likes where that arc puts her: a veteran blue-liner who can steady a young group and still jump into the A-Team when needed.

Aneta Cornová celebrating a street hockey tournament victory with long time best friend and current PWHL star Daniela Pejšová

Her goal now she’s back? She jokes first “First place!” then gives the honest one: “ I just want to play healthy the whole year. Make everyday count.” She wants to win shifts, not just games. She’d like a chance to continue advancing and getting better, but there’s no manifesto. After hockey, she wants to coach so she can stay in the game, has plans to stay in Switzerland, and wants keep persuading friends to join the alpine life. She teases best friend Daniela Pejšová about coming to Zurich one day, even as Pejšová digs in with the Boston Fleet in the PWHL. For Cornová, sharing her love for hockey, her life in the Swiss mountains, and making her family and friends proud is the only thing that matters. Being able to lace up her skates again is best way she knows how.

In the end, this isn’t a “back from injury” story as much as a “forward into gratitude” story. Cornová still feels pain from an injury that without a doubt will linger, potentially permanently. She still negotiates with her body on that. But hockey’s back on the table, and she knows exactly how fragile and joyous that is. You don’t know which shift will be your last. That truth doesn’t scare her anymore. It only sharpens her.