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History Of Baseball Part 1
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How to Play Hockey
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History of Hockey
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The Golf Vacation

History of Hockey

There are many conflicting theories on when and where the game of hockey started but for all accounts the history of  hockey as a game evolved from the Irish field game called Hurley. Hurley was played year round in Ireland on a field with a ball and stick. The game of Hurley was played regularly in the fields of Halifax back in the early 1800's and when winter came around Hurley was to difficult to play because of the rough ground caused by snow and freezing so the game was eventually moved onto the ice of the local lakes. This new game called "Hurley on Ice" basically started at King's College in Windsor, Nova Scotia just outside of the City remembered as Halifax Hockey and became very popular on the East coast of Canada for the first 50 years of the 1800's.

This Hurley on Ice was also called Rickets and Shinny but was eventually called Hockey somewhere in the later part of the 1800's. It is believed that a Royal Canadian Rifles officer stationed in Nova Scotia named "Hockey" for years had his men play this game and that's how the name of Hurley or Shinny changed to the name Hockey. In the early 1870's an engineer named James Creighton taught his friends at McGill University on how to play this new game of hockey he learned while living in Nova Scotia. This set the stage in Montreal in the mid 1870's for the first organized hockey game that was played inside a rink. Eventually James Creighton wrote up new rules called the "Halifax Rules" which had 9 players on each team. Hockey in history was very popular in Montreal at that time. James Creighton, by then a lawyer by profession, decided to move on to Ottawa and eventually became the Law Clerk of the Government Senate. He then started Ottawa's first organized hockey team called the Rideau Hall Rebels in the late 1880's. Also around this same time the first organized amateur hockey league started in Kingston, Ontario and had 4 teams.

In 1892 Lord Stanley, Earl of Preston and the Governor General of Canada decided to donate a cup that could be challenged by amateur hockey teams in Canada. The first Stanley Cup winner was the Montreal AAA (Amateur Athletic Association) in 1893. By the end of the 1800's historical hockey aspect was becoming the national sport of Canada because almost all regions of the country were playing this new sport. 

The hockey history in the 1900's saw the invention of the tube skates which eventually evolved into the present day skates and also netting that was not used in the last century was also invented. The number of players allowed on each team went from 9 to 7 (3 forwards, 2 defenseman, 1 rover and 1 goalie). It stayed this way until the NHL was formed and the rover position was dropped which meant 6 players aside.

The historical hockey era from the turn of the century to 1917 saw many professional leagues formed like the International Pro Hockey League, National Hockey Association (NHA) and the Pacific Coast League (PCL). All these leagues eventually folded which lead to the creation of the National Hockey League (NHL) in 1917, which is in existence to this day.