Hockey in Sardinia: at Forte Village you can
Hockey Academy: from Ancient Greece to our time
Children are continuously in movement, even on vacation and while parents dream of having a massage with Ayurvedic oils, immersed in the relaxing atmosphere of a Private spa, the important thing for the little ones is having fun with their friends, playing football or experimenting different sports, for example playing at the Hockey Academy.
Forte Village resort in Sardinia, is the ideal location for parents looking for relax and for children wanting to learn how to play hockey with great champions who have left a mark in the history of one of the oldest team sports ever.
Hockey: history and curiosities, past and present
In a hockey game, there are two teams of 11 players each including a goalkeeper, playing against each other. The objective is to push a disc or ball into the adversaries goal by using a stick, the team that scores the highest number of points wins the game.
The etymology of the name is unknown and also the origin of hockey on grass or on ice came to be is a mystery, but many theories have been formulated over the years in where the word “hockey” comes from including it being a transformation of hok (or hak), an ancient Germanic word meaning “piece of metal or curved wood”. Others think it might come from the French word hoquet, meaning “curved piece of wood” or “Shepard’s stick”, the Native Canadian Americans had the expression “hoo-gee”, or it could be a tribute to colonel Hockey who is said to have invented the game for his soldiers to play in their free time.
A hypothesis claims hockey comes from hockie, a game banned in 1527 in Galway and ancestor of hurling, a team sport played in open air of Celtic origin.
The word hockey was used as we know it today in 1838 in the William Holloway’s General Dictionary of Provincialism, although the exact origin of the game is a mystery, some ancient relics tell us it was played in Ancient Greece and then spread over Europe, mostly in Scotland and England where they started playing it also on grass, called field hockey.
Anyhow the unforgiving cold temperatures in the north of Europe made it a necessity to find a different way of playing field hockey, this brought to the invention of bandy, a discipline still considered today one hockey’s ancestors. Bandy conquered Northern Europe and was spread over Russia as well, in 1891 the National Bandy Association was founded, an institution which established the rules of the game and was responsible for organizing the main international tournaments.
The stories connected to hockey continue in North America when, between the XVIII and the XIX century, many British migrants brought the game with them to Windsor, Halifax, Kingston and Montreal, the first official tournament was in 1883 and was organized in occasion of the Winter Carnival of Montreal. The first Championship in Europe was in 1910 and the first one on ice was in 1920, the first time this discipline was officially made part of the Olympic Games of the Anversa edition, instead of being field hockey, was in 1908.
Hockey Academy by Legend: at Forte Village, we play with European and World champions
Field hockey is a team sport played on both natural or synthetic grass fields, and at Forte Village Resort in Sardinia, the new Hockey Academy by Legend is a fantastic addition to the Sports Area of the resort.
While parents are discovering the virtues of Thalassotherapy treatments, girls and boys can have lessons at the new field hockey school of Forte Village, wherefrom the 27th to the 31st of May 2019, there will be European and world champions and winners of Olympic medals Katie Louise, Richardson-Wash and Helen Richardson-Walsh, teaching at the academy.
Learning to play team sports like hockey at Forte Village Resort doesn’t only mean being trained by great champions, it also means making new friends, learning the values of being a team and the importance of cooperation since in hockey, just like in other team sport including football or basketball, the player never plays for him or herself, they are part of a group with the same objective: winning.
Therefore it’s fundamental to learn how to listen to both the coach and to other team players, collaborating with every single member so not to have rivals able to compromising the victory of the team.
