Lloyd Holbrook, age 13, of Visalia, Calif., for his question:
WHERE WAS HOCKEY FIRST PLAYED?
International amateur hockey is regulated by an organization called the International Ice Hockey Federation. Organizations from about 30 countries belong, with Canada and the United States having most members. About 600,000 registered amateur hockey players can be found in Canada, while about 250,000 skaters are members in the United States.
Canada is known as the mother of the exciting game of ice hockey. British soldiers stationed in Kingston, Ontario, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, probably played the world’s first game of ice hockey in 1855. The idea of the game undoubtedly came from the older sport of field hockey where players hit rubber balls through goals at each end of a playing field with curved sticks.
In the early 1870s, some students from Montreal’s McGill University put together the first formal rules for ice hockey. At this time a puck replaced the earlier rubber ball and the number of players was set at nine.
McGill University’s hockey rules became widely distributed during the 1880s, and the popularity of the game quickly spread. Teams were formed all across Canada, and by 1893 the sport was so popular that the governor general, Lord Stanley of Preston, donated a silver bowl to be awarded annually to Canada’s champion hockey team. The team from Montreal won the first Stanley Cup match in 1894.
United States saw its first hockey game in 1895 when a team from Yale University met one from Johns Hopkins University.
The world’s first professional hockey team was organized at Houghton, Mich., in 1903. Most of the players were Canadians. The next year the International Pro Hockey League was formed, and it included teams from both Canada and the United States. Six man teams were introduced at this time.
In 1917 the famous National Hockey Assn. (NHL) was formed in Montreal, with teams also coming from Ottawa and Toronto. The Boston Bruins in 1924 became the first team from the United States to join, with teams from Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh and two from New York City joining in 1925 and 1926.
During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, professional ice hockey expanded to many cities across the United States and Canada. The NHL expansion program, actually started in 1967, brought new divisions and enlarged the playoff structure to allow more teams to compete in the race for the famous Stanley Cup.
In 1971 a World Hockey Assn. was organized and it began its first season of play in 1972.