What is Hockey

Hockey

The word “hockey” refers to a family of different team games played in the summer and winter that have their roots in outdoor fields, ice sheets, or dry surfaces like gyms. These games have different regulations, player counts, uniforms, and playing fields, but they all include two opposing teams using sticks to drive a ball or disk into a goal.

Hockey comes in a variety of forms. Skates, whether they be wheeled or bladed, are used in certain games but not in others. The terms field hockey, ice hockey, roller hockey, rink hockey, and floor hockey are frequently used before the word hockey to aid in the differentiation between these different games.

In each of these sports, two teams compete against one another by attempting to use a hockey stick to move the object of play—which might be any kind of ball or disk, like a puck—into the opponent’s goal. There are two major exceptions: one uses a straight stick, and the other uses an open disk with a hole in the middle that is nonetheless called a puck. The first example involves a type of floor hockey whose regulations were established in 1936 by Canadians Sam Jacks amidst the Great Depression. In the second instance, a variation was later altered sometime in the 1970s to create a corresponding game that would be acceptable for inclusion as a team sport in the recently formed Special Olympics.
Despite being connected to floor hockey, the floor game known as gym ringette is not a legitimate version because it was created in the 1990s and was based on the 1963-invented ice skating team sport in Canada called ringette. Sam Jacks, a Canadian who also invented ringette, was also responsible for codifying the floor hockey regulations for the open disk style in 1936.

Lacrosse, hurling, camogie, and shinty are a few sports that are not usually referred to as hockey but have some broad similarities with the forms of the game.