Figure 1.--Here we see a modern, well-equipped German youth ice hockey team. I think the photograph was taken in 2004.

Ice hockey is played in a relatively small mumber of northern hemishere countries, but in several of the countries where it is played it has become a phenomenal passion. Some of the countries where ice hockey is particularly popular include: America (northeast region), Canada, Germany, Sweden, and Russia. Ice hockey is also big in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the former Czechoslovakia. We notice American school teams. The earliest school program we note is St. Paul's in New Hampsire. Canadian boys seem to have introfuced the sport (1860s). An example here is the Holderness School in 1930-31. A British reader writes, "I had a Polish friend. I remember him talking about ice-hockey – he had some team shirt which he'd got from relatives – not in Poland but in Chicago! They followed a team there – as well as Poland in the Olympics I think. It stuck me as unusual at the time as nobody else had the least interest in that sport in London (who I knew that is) when I was a kid in the 1960s and 70s." We do not have a lot of information on hockey yet. We notice American city boys with hockey sticks playing on rollar skates in the 1900s, presumably this was a form of ice hockey that city kids could play when an ice covered pond was not readily available. We know youth teams were popular in Canada and America. We note youth teams in Grmany, but we do not believe they were organized until after World War II.

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Created: 10:58 PM 7/30/2004
Last updated: 12:07 PM 1/28/2011