When did Hockey begin?

Field hockey is so old that even historians aren't sure when it started. It is the oldest known ball-and-stick game and is believed to date from the earliest civilizations. The Arabs, Greeks, Persians and Romans each had their own versions of field hockey and traces of a stick game played by the Aztec Indians of South America have also been found. Hockey can also be identified with other early games, such as hurling and shinty and, during the Middle Ages, a French stick game called hoquet was played, and the English word may have derived from this.

'Modern field hockey' developed in the British Isles in public schools and by the first half of the 1800s field hockey was quite popular. The first club was Blackheath, headquarters in southeast London. The club played on a large piece of open ground with crudely designed sticks. It was left to another London club called Teddington to modernize and refine the game by introducing several major rule changes including the ban of using hands and lifting sticks above the shoulders. They also instituted the striking circle, which was incorporated into the rules of the newly-founded Hockey Association in London in 1886. Today, field hockey is played all over the world by a variety of countries and is recognized as the second most popular team sport in the world, just behind football (soccer)

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