Hockey (Amateur)

In most parts of the world where it is played, “hockey” means ice hockey unless otherwise indicated. Like baseball, hockey is a sport whose origins are difficult to pinpoint precisely: Rather than appearing all of a sudden as an individual's invention, it developed over time out of a tradition of field sports brought by Europeans to North America. Field hockey, hockey-like games, and mounted hockey-like games like polo have been played throughout the Western world since the ancient era, probably because of the ease of creating the equipment in an age when most adults had a knife and at least rudimentary woodcarving skills.

If the essence of baseball-like games is the use of a bat to strike a pitched ball in the air, the essence of hockey is the use of a curved stick to move a contested ball on the ground; two very different families of games, the ancestors of the very different hockey and baseball, developed from virtually identical playing conditions and resources. In the case of ice hockey, the “ball” is a flat-bottomed puck that slides across the ice instead of rolling on it. In other respects, the mechanics of the modern sport are highly similar regardless of the playing surface.

Ice Hockey

Just as opportunistic, ice hockey has much in common with the evolution of street games: it originated as a way to take a sport for which the equipment is already available, and to place it in a new playing environment. More physical, aggressive, and injury-prone than field [Page 301]hockey—which had intentionally shied away from rugby-like aspects in the development of its rules and practices—ice hockey may have been influenced by lacrosse, a Native American sport played throughout Canada and the northern United States.

Today, especially at the amateur or scholastic level, field hockey is often a women's sport. Women have played it since only a few years after the cricketers developed the mens' game throughout the British empire.

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