In field hockey, each player carries a stick and cannot take part in the game without it. The stick for an adult is usually in the range long. A maximum length of was stipulated from 2015. The maximum permitted weight is .Rules of Hockey 2015-2016 The majority of players use a stick in the range . Traditionally hockey sticks were made of hickory, ash or mulberry wood with the head of the sticks being hand carved and therefore required skilled craftsmen to produce. Sticks made of wood continue to be made but the higher grade sticks are now manufactured from composite materials which were first permitted after 1992. These sticks usually contain a combination of fibreglass, aramid fiber and carbon fibre in varying proportions according to the characteristics (flexibility; stiffness; resistance to impact and abrasion) required.
Early rules
After centuries of different variations of field hockey (including a version in England, sometime prior to 1860, in which, because of the very hilly heathland area in which it was played, a rubber cube and not a ball was used), the game became more organised and regularised.
By 1886, when an association of clubs was formed and the game became more standardised, the modern game as we know it began (and a white painted cricket ball had become the standard object to play with). The game had also by this time divided into various branches which developed as separate sports. Shinty, a game popular in Scotland, uses both sides of a round stick with a curved end, which is shaped in a similar way to a walking stick; the Irish game, hurling, uses both sides of a stick which is flat on both sides and shaped somewhat like bill-hook with an axe-like handle. Bandy also uses both sides of the stick. It was called "hockey on ice" in the beginning, as it was considered an ice variety of hockey. The stick in England, possibly because of the close association with it of cricket players, developed with a stick with just one flat playing side, the left face, below a round grip area—with the use of the right-face side, which is rounded, prohibited—an oddity that had a profound effect on the later development of the hockey stick and of the game itself.
There have been only three parts of a hockey stick ever named in the rules: the head, the handle, and the splice. Originally (until 2004) the handle was the part above the bottom end of the splice and the head was the part below the bottom end of the splice. Other terms in common use are "grip", which refers to the part of the stick held, particularly that area held with two hands when hitting the ball. Most sticks have a round grip which is covered in a non-slip, sweat absorbent, fabric tape. The handle remains rounded on the reverse, back or right hand-side but becomes gradually flat on the "face" side and also becomes wider, changing from a diameter of approximately 30 mm to a flat width of approximately 46 mm (the permitted maximum was 2 in—now 51 mm). This flat area above the curve of the head is generally referred to as the "shaft". The head of the stick is generally thought of as the curved part. The right side is called the face, the upturn the "toe" and the bend of the head where it joins the shaft the "heel". In recent times using the edges of the stick (as well as the face side) to strike at the ball has been permitted and thus "forehand edge stroke" and "reverse edge stroke" will be found in rule terminology. Forehand and reverse stroke refers to the taking of these strokes, from the right or left hand side of the body respectively, as the stick may be used "face up" or "face down" to make an edge stroke, the two edges of the stick are not separately named but simply referred to as edges.
Initially there were six rule requirements applying to the hockey stick:
The stick had to be flat on the playing side (the left side when the toe of the stick head is facing away from the user). It had to be able to be passed completely through a (internal diameter) ring. The stick was to be smooth (no rough or sharp edges). The head of the stick was to be a) curved and b) made from wood. A minimum and maximum weight were specified, respectively.
During the 19th century, field hockey evolved in England. This evolution led to the creation of the Federation Internationale de Hockey (FIH) in 1924.
Contance Applebee is responsible for introducing field hockey to the United States in 1901. The United States Field Hockey Association was formed in 1922.
In 1908, men's field hockey was introduced into the Olympic Games. Women's field hockey was first recognized in the Olympic Games in 1980.
The World Cup is the crowning achievement in international field hockey. The World Cup is held every four years and 12 men's and 12 women's teams compete for the title of World Champion.
Head length
The first major developments to what was later termed the "English style" stick (and the method of play with such sticks) occurred in India. (The game in its modern form was apparently brought to India by the British Army, although there does not appear to be any specific evidence of this. But certainly hockey was played by the British forces in India.) At that time the stick head was very long (in excess of ) and made from an indigenous British timber, ash. The Indians then produced sticks with a much shorter head length and a tighter heel bend and used mulberry, which is tougher than ash, but has similar bending characteristics and weight and is easy to work. This development changed the nature of the game, led to the "Indian dribble" and to Indian dominance of the game in the first half of the twentieth century.
A hockey stick is occasionally used in the vertical position shown, but manipulating the movement and the direction of the ball in a controlled way (dribbling) is carried out in what is termed a "dribbling crouch", when the handle of the stick will usually be angled between 35° and 55°. Hitting or pushing the ball can be done with the stick at any angle between the vertical and horizontal and recent changes to the rules allow even the edges of the stick to be used to sweep or strike at the ball on the ground. The various stick head designs can be compared in respect of how, with the handle at an angle of 45°, they differ in the carrying out of the Indian dribble, i.e. controlling the direction of the ball by rotating the stick head over the top/front of the ball rather than (or as well as) around the back of the ball (the English style dribble). The multi-layered stick head diagram indicates the changes in head shape and length that occurred over thirty years or so.
The earliest trend was in shortening the stick head. While that reduced the stopping area of the head it was beneficial because, according to the rules at the time, only one side of the stick head could be used (at that time the ball could not be played with the edges of the head or handle but with the flat side or face side only).
Using extreme examples is useful as a means of demonstrating effects that occur in less extreme configurations but are much more difficult to spot and therefore to explain. The first observation is an easy one (top left in the image captioned "Reversed head in various..."). If the stick head is rotated onto the reverse (lighter colour) the toe is not going to disappear into the ground to enable the reverse side of the stick to be presented to the ball—a vertical adjustment is necessary. Secondly (top right), if the handle of the stick is kept at exactly the same angle and rotated, a horizontal adjustment is necessary to bring the reversed head to a position where contact will be made with the ball. The third figure (bottom left) shows these adjustments having been made (and a change to the angle of the handle because the position of the hand holding the stick at the top would be about the same as it is when gripping the stick in the forehand position), but the area of stick head making contact with the ball is very small; so control may not be adequate. The fourth figure (bottom right) demonstrates that to get good contact with the ball on a larger area of the reversed head, it is necessary to move the handle much nearer to the vertical. This means the player must bring the ball in very close to the feet and come to a more upright dribbling position—this in turn impairs the ability to scan the pitch and keep the ball in peripheral vision at the same time—a considerable disadvantage when dribbling to evade opponents.
So, although the long head stick was an adequate shape for a dribbling style which was based on moving the ball forward from directly behind the ball; and changes of direction could be achieved by rotating the stick around the back of the ball and/or moving the feet to either side of the ball, it was not so easy to use the long stick head to bring the ball across the feet and back again, particularly when it was placed wide to the left of the feet of the player. (This left side position was compounded in difficulty with a very severe interpretation of "obstruction", which prohibited shielding of the ball from an opponent. The game was also, at the time, seen as "right-sided" and positioning the body between the ball and a close or closing opponent, approaching from the right hand side, was not allowed.) Reversed stick hitting, pushing and flicking would be short range skills and difficult to do accurately, if at all, especially when moving at speed.
Gradually over many years stick heads were made shorter and the "heel" was made to a tighter bend. This process continued until the "one piece" head could not be made to a sharper bend without the timber splitting out on the base. As it was, attempts to have the grain follow entirely the same curve as the bend, as it should for maximum strength (this is why the timber is bent rather than cut to shape) were abandoned by some producers and an upturn to the toe was sometimes achieved by cutting across the wood-grain at the toe end of the head to achieve the desired shape. Some manufacturers resorted to gluing a separate piece of wood on top of the toe or glued additional strips of timber to the inner edge of the handle above the head to get the effect of a tighter heel bend. ("Head adjustment" frequently happened to update old style stock or where unmodified presses were in use.).
Some players were cutting part of the toe off their sticks, to achieve a shorter head, and rounding the end off, (although on the older styles this did nothing to tighten the bend to the heel and often just ruined the stick). Predictably, there were sticks produced for the 1986 World Cup with heads with a horizontal length of only 95 mm. The international players to whom they were handed out tried them and then returned them as unusable.