ICE HOCKEY

Ice hockey

Ice hockey, often referred to simply as hockey, is a team sport played on ice. It is a fast paced and physical sport. Ice hockey is most popular in areas that are sufficiently cold for natural reliable cyclic ice cover such because Canada, the northern United States, Scandinavia and Russia, though with the advent of indoor false ice rinks it has become a year-round action at the amateur level in major metropolitan areas such as cities that host a National Hockey League (NHL) or other professional-league team. It is one of the four major North American professional sports education, and the NHL is at the highest level, and the Canadian Women's Hockey League (CWHL) and the Western Women's Hockey League (WWHL) are at the highest level of women's ice hockey in the world. It is the official countrywide winter sport of Canada, where the game enjoys immense popularity. Only six of the thirty NHL franchises are based in Canada, but Canadian players outnumber Americans in the league. While there are 66 total members of the International Ice Hockey confederation (IIHF), Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden and the United States have over in a large amount of the coveted 1st, 2nd and 3rd places at IIHF World championship. Of the 63 medals awarded in men's competition at the Olympic level from 1920 on, only six did not go to the one of those countries, or a former body thereof, such as Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union. Only one of those six medals was over bronze. Those seven nations have also captured 162 of 177 medal awarded at 59 non-Olympic IIHF World Championships, and all medals since 1954. Likewise, all nine Olympic and 27 IIHF World Women Championships medals have gone to one of persons seven country.

History

European immigrants brought various version of hockey-like sports competition to North America, such as the Irish sport of hurling, the directly related Scottish sport of shiny, and versions of field hockey played in England. Where necessary these seem to have been adapted for icy conditions; for example, a colonial Williamsburg newspaper records hockey being played in a snow storm in Virginia. Early paintings show "shinny", an early form of hockey with no standard rules, being played in Nova Scotia. Contrary to popular beliefs, the first "bureaucrat" game of hockey was played in Windsor, Nova Scotia, not Kingston, Ontario, or Montreal, Quebec. Author Thomas Chandler Halliburton wrote in a book of fiction, about boys as of King's College School in Windsor, Nova Scotia, playing "Hurley on the ice" when he was a student there around 1800 (Halliburton was born in 1796). To this daylight hours, shinny (or spinney) (derived from Shiny) is a popular Canadian term for an informal type of hockey, either on ice or as street hockey. These early games may have also engrossed the physically aggressive aspects of what the Milkmen Aboriginal First Nation in Nova Scotia called dehuntshigwa'es (lacrosse).Ye Glued Older Days, from Hockey: Canada's Royal Winter Game, 1899.In 1825 Sir John Franklin wrote so as to "The game of hockey played on the ice was the morning sport" while on Great Bear Lake during one of his Arctic expeditions. In 1843 a British Army officer in Kingston, Ontario, wrote "begin to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on the ice." A Boston Evening Gazette article from 1859 makes situation to an early game of hockey on ice occurring in Halifax in that year. The first recorded hockey games were played by British soldiers stationed in Kingston and Halifax during the mid 1850s. In the early 1870s, the first known set of ice hockey rules were drawn up by student at Montreal's McGill institution of higher education. These rules established the number of players per side to 9 and replaced the ball with a square puck. Based on Halliburton’s writings, there have been claims that modern ice hockey originated in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and was name after an individual, as in 'Colonel Hockey's game'. Proponents of this theory claim that the surname Hockey exists in the district surrounding Windsor. In 1943, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association declared Kingston the birthplace of hockey, based on a record 1886 game played between students of Queen's University and the Royal without arms College of Canada. The Society for global Hockey Research has had an "origins of hockey" committee studying this debate since 2001 and they defined hockey as: "a game played on an ice rink in which two contrasting teams of skaters, using curved sticks, try to drive a small disc, ball or block into or through the reverse goals.” The committee found evidence of stick and ball games played on ice on skates in Europe in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, and viewed these activities as being more indicative of a hockey-like game than Halliburton’s suggestion. They found no evidence in the Windsor position of a connection from whatever form of hockey might have been played at Long Pond to the game played elsewhere and to modern hockey. The committee viewed as guess the assertion that King’s schoolboys introduce the game to Halifax. They noted that the assertion that hockey was not played outside Nova Scotia until 1865 overlooks diary evidence of shinny and hockey organism played at Kingston inside the 1840s.The group concluded that Dr. Vaughan and the Windsor Hockey Heritage Society had not offered credible evidence so as to Windsor, Nova Scotia, is the birthplace of hockey. The committee offered no opinion on the birth date or birthplace of hockey, but took note of a game at Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink on March 3, 1875. This is the earliest witness account known to the committee of a specific game of hockey in a specific place at a specific time, and with a recorded score, among two identified teams. According to the Society for International Hockey investigate, the word puck is derived from the Scottish and Gaelic utterance "pup" or the Irish word "pooch", meaning to poke, punch or deliver a blow. This meaning is explained in a book published in 1910 entitled "English as we Speak it in Ireland" by P.W. Joyce. It defines the word puck as "… The blow given by a hurler to the sphere with his cumin or hurler is always called a puck".