Variants include:


It is belived to have developed from Lacross.

The structure of a hockey game confuses the hell out of people who have grown up with standard American timed sports -- instead of having 4 quarters, and halftime between the second and third quarters, a hockey game is subdivided into three 20-minute periods, with two 20-minute intermissions inbetween. This seems like a simple concept, and indeed it is, but you would not believe the difficulty some people have with this. Hockey was introduced to Richmond, Virginia in 1990 by the Richmond Renegades of the East Coast Hockey League, and I became a fan on the spot. Despite my explanations, though, I think it took my mom, born and raised in the Tidewater, about six years before she understood the idea of three periods making up a game, and there being no halftime.

The International Hockey League experimented with a four-quarter game once in 1998, in two games involving the Las Vegas Thunder, in a marketing gambit to see if the game could be standardized into a similar structure as most other timed sports A five-minute break was used between quarters 1 and 2 and quarters 3 and 4, and a 20-30 minute halftime was used. Hockey purists the world over screamed in agony, but more important was the fact that the players and coaches didn't like it, complaining that the five-minute break was worthless, 15 continuous minutes was too short to get a rhythm going, and 30 semi-continuous minutes was too long before they could go back to the locker room for a real break.

Hock"ey (?), n. [From Hook, n.]

1.

A game in which two parties of players, armed with sticks curved or hooked at the end, attempt to drive any small object (as a ball or a bit of wood) toward opposite goals.

2.

The stick used by the players.

[Written also hookey and hawkey.]

 

© Webster 1913.

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