History of field hockey

In Inner Mongolia, China, the Daur people have been playing Beikou (a game similar to modern field hockey) for about 1,000 years.

In Western Australia, early white settlers witnessed Noongar people played a game called dumbung, in which bent sticks were used to hit a ball made of dried sap from the native peartree.

In Punjab, there is a traditional hockey-like game known as khido khundi, roughly translating to "ball and blunt stick".

[citation needed] A game called hockey was played in English public schools in the early 19th century.

In 1870, members of the Teddington cricket club, who had recently moved to play in Bushy Park, were looking for a winter activity.

By 1874 they had begun to draw up rules for their game, including banning the raising of the stick above shoulder height and stipulating that a shot at goal must take place within the circle in front of it.

Blackheath were one of the founder members, but refused to accept the rules drawn up by the other clubs and left to found the National Hockey Union.

They rejected a form of the game that involved a 7 oz (200 g) rubber cube, catching, marking and scrimmaging, based on rugby football, at the time favoured by the Blackheath club.

The Teddington club chose to limit the number per side to eleven, and preferred to play with old cricket balls.

The development of the FIH owes a lot to the work of Réné George Frank, a Belgian, in the years after the Second World War until the 1970s.

Due to the 1980 Summer Olympics boycott by many of the dominant nations at the time, Zimbabwe won the inaugural women's event with a fully amateur team.

Since 1980 women's attire has changed with miniskirts replacing pleated skirts for female outfield players and umpires,[3] but concerns of embarrassment for girls led to shorts being allowed from 2023 onwards.

[4] In the early 1970s, the "synthetic grass" fields began to be used for hockey, with the first Olympic Games on this surface being held at the 1976 Montreal edition.

While hockey is still played on grass fields at some local levels and lesser national divisions, it has been replaced by synthetic turf almost everywhere in the western world.

Regarding the evolution of the hockey player material, the sticks have changed shape, with the bent head at the bottom, which used to be about 15 centimetres long, becoming much stubbier.

These plastic balls are cheaper, more durable, more consistent in their behaviour, and are unaffected by water; a key requirement in water-moderated synthetic fields used in elite-level hockey.