The Origins of the Game :

Hockey-like games involving sticks and balls have been played for thousands of years. Historical records show that a crude form of hockey was played in Egypt 4,000 years ago, and in Ethiopia around 1,000 BC. Various museums offer evidence that a form of the game was played by Romans, Greeks and by the Aztec Indians of South America several centuries before Columbus landed in the New World.

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens holds a square marble slab measuring 60 cm x 20 cm with four bas-reliefs of ancient sporting events. One of these shows Athenian youths playing field hockey. These bas-reliefs date back to 514 BC and show that a type of hockey was being enjoyed in Greece at that time. This type of hockey, called "ÊÅÑÇÔÉÆÅÉÍ" (Keritizin) in ancient Greece, was very popular. Called such names as "paganica" by the Romans, "hurling" by the Irish and "shinty" by the Scots, the name "hockie" seems to have been first recorded in Ireland in 1527 and probably comes from the French word "hoquet" meaning "shepherds crook".

Over the last 500 years, Soft Hockey has been played in Ancient Countries under different names, especially in India and has been one of the most popular sports in the villages where there is no proper infrastructure to cope with field hockey. This sport is very popular in rural areas and also with Urban School children. Earlier, villagers used to make the hockey stick with bamboo. Soft balls were also made of bamboo & homemade rubber and the reason it was so popular was that the game required few players, either Men or Women, or both, with minimum equipment and a small ground. The chances of injury were less in comparison to other games. The game used to be played by pushing the ball and not hitting it as this would lead to a longer period in recovering the ball, which would probably go into the ponds or bushes. The ploughable fields used to act as the playground and the border of the fields acted as boundary. Thus, the game of Soft Hockey came into being with SPEED, STAMINA and SKILL being the associated qualities.

Over the same period on other Continents, the sport has been refined and developed into other separate sports like field hockey, shinty, cricket, ice-hockey, la-crosse, croquet etc, but most historians place the roots of modern hockey in the chilly climes of northern Europe, specifically in Great Britain and France where field hockey was always a popular summer sport.

Hockey in England in the 17th and 18th century consisted of whole villages playing the game with the objective of hitting the ball into the opposing villages' common ground. Teams often consisted of 60 to 100 players and games occasionally lasted several days or so with injuries such as broken arms and legs not uncommon. Umpires could only arbitrate a decision if called upon to do so by a player from one of the teams. (a situation that sounds familiar even in these days and in 1527 hockey had been forbidden because of the violence among the players!).

When ponds and lakes froze in winter, it was not unusual for the athletes to play a version of it on ice. An ice game known as kolven was popular in Holland in the 17th century and later on the game really took hold in England. In his book, Fischler's Illustrated History of Hockey, veteran hockey journalist and broadcaster Stan Fischler writes about a rudimentary version of the sport becoming popular in the English marshland community of Bury Fen in the 1820s. The game, he explains, was called bandy, and the local players used to scramble around the town's frozen meadowlands, swatting a wooden or cork ball, known as a kit or cat, with wooden sticks made from the branches of local willow trees. Articles in London newspapers around that time mention increasing interest in the sport, which many observers believe got its name from the French word hoquet, which means "shepherd's crook" or "bent stick." A number of writers thought this game should be forbidden because it was so disruptive to people out for a leisurely winter skate.

In 1852 the sports master of Harrow Public School advised his pupils that, among other things, no more than thirty players per team were allowed on the field at any one time. In those early days, team formation consisted of having more forwards than defenders, a situation that persisted up until the late 1800's.

The game that we know today emerged at Eton College in England in the 1860s when the first rules were written down. Further rules were written in 1875 when the first Hockey Association was formed. The game was played on a field nearly 200 metres in length and all players chased the ball for the whole of the game. London's Wimbledon Hockey Club (organized 1883) standardized the game after the many centuries of informal play in England and it thereafter spread to other countries, particularly in Europe and the British empire. In 1886 the Teddington Cricket Club effectively lead a movement which resulted in the British Hockey Association being formed which included amongst its rules a striking circle for hitting goals.
Changes in rules and play quickly developed from this beginning and by 1889 the pyramid system - five forwards, three halves, two backs and a goalkeeper became the accepted method of playing hockey.

In 1890 the English, Irish and Welsh hockey associations formed the International Rules Board and umpires were given power to make decisions without waiting for players to appeal for a free hit - something that a large number of players have yet to learn. See 1892 Hockey Rules. The men of the United States also started playing field hockey in 1890, with the Field Hockey Association of America, which regulates men's play, being formed in 1930. However, the sport has little appeal to American males and they only medalled once (bronze in 1932) in Olympic competition, which India, Great Britain, and Pakistan have dominated. Rules for men and women there are essentially the same as in Great Britain - see M. J. Barnes and R. G. Kentwall, Field Hockey (2d ed. 1978).

Hockey, or "Field Hockey" as it is also known, is now played in every continent with many nations competing in the three major competitions - The Olympic Games, The World Cup and The Champion's Trophy.
 

The Rise of Professional Hockey (the Fédération Internationale de Hockey (F.I.H.))

Hockey was a strictly amateur affair until 1904, when the first professional league was created - oddly enough in the United States. Known as the International Pro Hockey League, it was based in the iron-mining region of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. That folded in 1907 and an even bigger league, the National Hockey Association (NHA) emerged three years later. Shortly after that came the Pacific Coast League (PCL) and in 1914, a transcontinental championship series was arranged between the two, with the winner getting the coveted cup of Lord Stanley. However, the men running the NHA decided to suspend operations when World War I threw the entire hockey establishment into disarray.

The first Olympic Hockey Competition was held in London in 1908 with men's teams competing and with England, Ireland and Scotland competing separately. Women's hockey was not included in the Olympics until 1980. Hockey was played at the Commonwealth Games for the first time in 1998.

After having made its first appearance in the 1908 Games, hockey was subsequently dropped from the 1912 Stockholm Games, and reappeared in 1920 in Antwerp before being omitted again in Paris in 1924. The Paris organisers refused to include hockey on the basis that the sport had no International Federation.

Hockey had made its first steps toward an international federation when in 1909 the Hockey Association in England and the Belgium Hockey Association agreed to mutually recognise each other to regulate international hockey relations. The French Association followed soon after, but this was not considered sufficient for recognition as an international federation!

Mr. Paul Léautey, a Frenchman who would become the first President of the FIH, was motivated to action following hockey's omission from the program of the 1924 Paris Games and hockey took its most important step forward when the International Hockey Federation, the world governing body for the sport, was founded in Paris in 1924 at his initiative. Mr. Léautey called together representatives from seven national federations to form the sport's international governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Hockey sur Gazon. The six founding members, which represented both men's and women's hockey in their countries, were Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Spain and Switzerland.

The women's game developed quickly in many countries and in 1927, the International Federation of Women's Hockey Associations (IFWHA) was formed. The founding members were Australia, Denmark, England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, the United States and Wales. After celebrating their respective Golden Jubilees -- the FIH in 1974 and the IFWHA in 1980 -- the two organisations came together in 1982 to form the FIH.

The growth of the International Hockey Federation from its early beginnings has been most impressive. Denmark joined in 1925, the Dutch men in 1926, Turkey in 1927, and in 1928 -- the year of the Amsterdam Olympics -- Germany, Poland, Portugal and India joined. India's addition marked the membership of the first non-European country.

By 1964, there were already fifty countries affiliated with the FIH, as well as three continental associations -- Africa, Pan America and Asia -- and in 1974, there were 71 members. Today, the International Hockey Federation consists of five Continental associations -- Europe and Oceania have since joined -- and 119 member associations, the most recent addition being the Bahamas Hockey Association which was admitted during the November 1996 FIH Congress.

Today, the work of the International Hockey Federation is accomplished through the efforts of the FIH President, Secretary General and Treasurer, working together with an Executive Board, the FIH Council, a number of instrumental Committees, and the professional staff in its Brussels headquarters.

In many ways, the FIH serves as the "guardian" of the sport. It works in co-operation with both the national and continental organisations to ensure consistency and unity in hockey around the world. The FIH not only regulates the sport, but is also responsible for its development and promotion so as to guarantee a secure future for hockey.

 

The Game - Clothing
It's remarkable how little equipment the hockey players of the past wore and how rudimentary the gear they did have truly was. In the beginning, skates consisted of blades that were attached to shoes, and sticks were made from tree branches. The first goalie shin and knee pads had originally been designed for cricket. The quality of the gear progressed over the years, with true hockey skates being made and players wearing protective gloves. Shin guards eventually came into being, but many times they didn't do much to soften the blow of a puck or stick, and players were known to stuff newspaper or magazines behind them for extra protection.

For many years the blades on sticks were completely straight, but New York Rangers star Andy Bathgate began experimenting with a curve in the late 1950s. During a European tour of Ranger and Blackhawk players, Bathgate showed his innovation to Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita, and they began playing with one themselves. And it wasn't long before most NHL players had done the same thing.  

Amazingly, goalies played without masks until 1959, when Jacques Plante wore face protection at a game in the old Madison Square Garden after he had taken a puck in the cheekbone from Andy Bathgate. Plante's coach, Toe Blake, pressured him to shed the mask later on, and he did for a while. But he started wearing a mask again the following spring, and other goaltenders eventually followed suit. But it wasn't until 1973 that an NHL netminder (journeyman Andy Brown) appeared in a game without a mask for the last time.

It's also surprising to think that players didn't begin wearing helmets with any sort of regularity until the early 1970s; prior to that the only people who wore them did so mostly because they were recovering from a head injury, or, as was the case of one former Chicago Blackhawk forward, because they were embarrassed about being bald. The League passed a rule prior to the start of the 1979-80 season decreeing that anyone who came into the NHL from that point on had to wear a helmet. By the early 1990s there were only a few players left who went bareheaded, and the last one to do so was Craig MacTavish, who retired after the 1996-97 season.

The Game - Equipment 
Hockey is predominantly played as a winter sport by two teams of eleven players (ten roving players and a goalkeeper). The aim of hockey is to score more goals than the other team and to do this players use their hockey sticks to propel the ball toward the team's goal. Players may run several kilometres in the course of the game. Hockey is essentially a non-body contact game (which is sometimes difficult to believe!) and rules restrict the amount of body contact and tackling that is permitted.

The hockey field or pitch is a rectangular field 60 yards wide and 100 yards long (54.90m by 91.50m).

Hockey games are played in two 35 minute halves with a five to ten minute break at half time. Two umpires control the game (one on each side of the field) and to score a goal you must shoot from within the circle (actually a semi circle) and the ball must pass wholly across the goal line.

The hockey stick is approximately one yard long with a curved end, is flat on one side and rounded on the other. The stick is made from hardwood (metals are forbidden) and usually has a laminated handle. Fibreglass is now widely used as a binding agent in the wooden stick. Hockey sticks may have different weights, curves and lengths but there is a maximum weight of 28 ounces and the stick must fit through a 2" diameter ring

The ball  can only be played with the flat side and edges of the stick, but there are many situations when it is necessary to turn the stick over with the end pointing downwards in the "reverse stick" position. There are no left-handed hockey sticks, but hockey players who are natural left-handers can still be very successful players.

The ball is the same size and weight as a cricket ball and is covered by a thin shell of dimpled plastic to keep it waterproof. Although white is the traditional colour, other colours may be used - bright orange is often used on sand filled artificial turf fields.

Field players usually wear only shin pads and mouth guards for protection, but goal keepers wear a considerable amount of protective clothing including chest, arm & throat protectors, gloves, leg pads and kicking boots, helmets, etc.

The rules and equipment for both men and women are the same - see FIH rules.