Seven years ago, I wrote this.
Last weekend, when I was at the National Indoor Tournament, I was made aware of a number of issues regarding the continuing splintering of the sport when it comes to the variations being played around the world.
We were watching the standard indoor hockey variant, which has been pretty much the same since the game was invented in the 1950s in Germany.
But a lot of conversation over the weekend was about USA Field Hockey’s recent decision to not participate in the variation of the sport called Hockey5s.
Hockey5s is a variant of the game which is meant to be played indoors or outdoors. It is meant to be played on turf, but competition surfaces have been hard-packed clay, like some tennis courts. It also has wooden side and end boards which are somewhat taller than the railroad tie-shaped boards for indoor hockey.
But last week, entering the chat in Rotterdam, Netherlands, came a new variant of field hockey — 3v3. The game is Nike’s new entree into the field hockey space, and it resembles the 2002 marketing campaign that Nike engineered to coincide with the Korea/Japan World Cup.
These field hockey games were invite-only, and held in the Maassilo event space in Rotterdam. The vibe was an “underground” feeling with black boards, black turf, and dimmed lighting. Have a look at this Instagram posting showing the court, which has a small slot at either end of the court which appears to be about maybe four feet wide and two feet high.
We haven’t run across video of the action yet, but we can discern that the games are only four minutes long (an eternity on a space this size) and there are no goalkeepers. In addition, the rules for the competition were that goals can only be scored from the attack half (much like Hockey5s), but most of the rest of the regulations were from indoor hockey. The ball cannot be driven; just pushed or flicked.
In a third of a century of covering sports, we’ve seen a lot of reduced-side games — futsal, 3×3 basketball, box and Sixes lacrosse, and Rugby Sevens.
But these continuous field hockey variants are, to me, a bit concerning. Yes, it could give people who run youth sports ideas as to try to develop more players in the overall game of field hockey, but which variant is going to be the dominant one going forward?