HOCKEY

Hockey

The introduction of synthetic surfaces has significantly changed field hockey, indeed since first being introduced in the 1970s competitions in western countries are now mainly played on artificial surfaces. This has increased the speed of the game considerably, and changed the shape of hockey sticks to allow for different techniques, such as reverse stick trapping and hitting.

Field hockey artificial turf differs from soccer and football artificial turf in that it does not try to reproduce the grass aesthetic and is made of a shorter fibres structure allowing the improvement in speed brought by earlier artificial turfs to be retained.

However there are issues for many local communities and also some countries who often cannot afford to build two artificial fields: one for field hockey and one for other sports; consequently the International Hockey Federation and manufacturers are driving research in order to produce new fields that will be suitable for a variety of sports.