With the U.S. ladies’s nationwide area hockey group ending their Olympic expertise yesterday in Paris, it’s time to do what appears to be our quadrennial train of examination of the American area hockey panorama.
For in the event you check out the sporting panorama, and area hockey’s place in it, since Los Angeles 1984 and examine it to now, you see surprisingly little change.
The footprint of the sport has modified little. It permeates the northeast U.S. and the mid-Atlantic, with pockets in California and the Midwest, however there are massive swaths of the Sunbelt, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southwest that wouldn’t have the game.
About the one progress you’re seeing within the sport is in Virginia and North Carolina, the place there are such a lot of scholastic groups beginning up that your entire postseason equipment in each states have needed to adapt.
On the similar time, you’re seeing a certain quantity of retrenchment. Gone are school applications at Philadelphia College, Cabrini School, The College of Rhode Island, Wesley School, and Hendrix.
In Division I, nationwide champions between 1987 and right now have come from precisely seven states. Division III has been a robust group of groups because the NCAA began sanctioning the game within the early 80s, and Division II has been going robust since a nationwide championship was reinstated in 1992. Neighborhood-college area hockey, nonetheless, dwindled all the way down to nothing by the flip of the century. Because of this, the sport continues to be seen as a regional as an alternative of a nationwide sport.
Too, there’s a lack of variety within the sport. There are only a few racial and ethnic minorities who play, and there’s additionally an absence of financial variety; the sport could be very a lot not a metropolis sport, regardless of a handful of groups which have performed inside the metropolis limits of Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. through the years.
However the worst variety downside is the truth that there are nonetheless no varsity applications for male area hockey gamers both on the collegiate or the scholastic degree. It’s a de facto single-gender sport, and there has not been a sustained, profitable effort at altering this.
Worse but there isn’t an American skilled area hockey league, one which supplies gamers within the high-performance pool an opportunity exterior of the national-team sphere to enhance their particular person and group expertise.
And the factor is, you may have stated all of this on an annual foundation since 1984.
For those who’re a stakeholder within the sport of area hockey and are studying this, you already know what it’s a must to do.
