Can we make field hockey a mainstream sport?

Totally agree I'm 2019 the new Hockey Pro league is coming and is going to have over 100 games within the span of 6 months The FIH are doin their best to start publicising, I guess the best we can do is support these sorts of things. Hockey is very popular and skilful so there is no reason it can't succeed and hopefully this new pro league will encourage other groups to start making more TV coverage and such

Thank you.

Brilliant spectacle live and as skilful a game as any on offer today. I played for more than 20 years here in Canberra and still attend the occasional international when they come to town, which is not as often as we would like. The game is so much better to watch than Soccer in my humble opinion and especially now that there is no off side. The only other games that I can compare the live experience with, are Ice Hockey, La X and Hurling all of which are equally brilliant in their own right. Many of my old hockey cohort express frustration that this game has not yet evolved as a mainstream sport in Australia despite our esteemed pedigree over many years. Given the exposure and commercial support, I reckon it would hold its own against some of those niche codes that struggle is a saturated sporting market, i.e. Basketball. Great to have India back in the mix, to be sure. They together with Pakistan were always the benchmark in my day.

Excellent work Chris. I went through a number of your photos and they are outstanding. I am so Glad you have this passion. I played a lot of Hockey when I was at school in India. It was a bit before the decline of Indian Hockey started. Looking at your albums, I can understand why the standard of Hockey in Australia has stayed at a high level. Because of the grass roots tournaments. Like the 2 month Long Indian Hockey League should be replicated in Australia, the lesson that India needs to learn is how grass roots Hockey creates the base for the national team's eventual success. Maybe you should take a holiday to India during the Indian Hockey League to photograph it. That could be fun!

In have been a fan of Field Hockey for years, I follow the University of Western Australia Hockey Club in the Premier Leagues. I have been photographing hockey since I was a boy and since 2008 sharing the photos on line using flickr, I think if more people were to share hockey photos and their hockey experiences we will see greater public awareness of the sport. Money will not flow into the game until those with money to invest can see that there are people interested in the sport. If you photograph hockey, please share your work with the world. I have been privileged to shoot, national, state and premier games as well as junior and other grades, there is a beauty in hockey that can not be explained in words alone. Chris Bartle. https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbartle/albums

Where do I sign? ?

After 40 years on the ice, the Indian hockey team is back. They played like a team that could win in the final and were arguably unlucky to lose to Australia on the day in the penalty shoot out. But notwithstanding the result, if the Indian team can keep playing at this level until Rio, it will actually help world hockey. As Ben said above, the IPL style tournament is already popular. For money to come into the game, and eventually make it mainstream, India is perhaps the best catalyst, and the success of the national team will really help.

The lead for hockey on TV is in India, where the Hockey India League is a tournament set up with plenty of bells and whistles and makes for decent TV viewing. It is a short tournament, only two months, and in many ways mirrors the IPL format with franchise teams. They seem to get decent crowds and certainly some air time. An Australian tournament with the winner competing in India in the Hockey India League? It may be worth exploring.

"both teams are currently suffering from a severe lack of profile both in the print media and on television". You can remove the currently out of that sentence, it's never been a popular sport driven by media coverage. I see no way of that changing which is strange as it's the one truly international sport where the Aussies are usually in the top 3 for men's and women's. It's fantastic as a spectator sport due to the speed at which it is played and skill level but then I played till I was 30 so I would think that. It seems something of a mystery to most.

Good points made in the article above. The main issue for myself is the restriction of access to digital media of these big Championship events. I am certainly not going to pay for Fox Sports to watch a replay of a game (at stupid times). The FIH has invested heavily to provide highlights of goals and saves in all these events BUT due to Hockey Australia and Foxtel making an agreement...I as a hockey lover am denied these opportunities to enjoy hockey and what the FIH is working towards! How is this beneficial to growing the game of hockey in Australia????

How about a State of Origin tournament, featuring six franchise teams? To emphazise gender equality, the mens and womens teams could alternate quarters. Instead of the classic round robins, each city could host a two-day leg, with three matches each day featuring all six teams. Over three weeks, one leg would be held on Wednesday-Thursday and another on Saturday-Sunday.

Dear Gent, Hockey suffers from a variety of issues where it comes to getting TV coverage. Building a regular weekly audience is the first step. This probably means a national weekly competition. Being a gender balanced sport actually causes a problem for broadcasting as you need twice the air time to cover both men and women! With the launch of a new women's AFL guess where any additional women's TV coverage is likely to go? Hockey Zone has for 5 years been a weekly TV program on Free to air in and around Brisbane as well as on Foxtel anywhere in the country. It uses Live streaming to show full coverage of 3 games a week of top competition, includes skills videos, local news, rules analysis and interviews with the Kookaburras and Hockeyroos. It provides highlights packages and segments on Youtube every week, shares on Facebook and Twitter to reach as big an audience as possible. Hockey Zone is actually owned by the hockey community and all funds raised from the production through sponsorship goes back into the hockey community, BUT it fails to gain support from many of the associations around the country and thus also suffers from gaining traction with the major broadcasters. Broadcasting is a bums on seats business, Hockey is about participation. I would seem a catch 22 where - if hockey was on TV it would gain more players - more players would mean more viewers - BUT unless a collective approach is worked out hockey is not able to deliver the numbers that would attract main stream broadcasting. One off events in the middle of the night on a network that can at best only deliver one third of the national audience, only tends to confirm the broadcasters suspicitions that the numbers are just not there. The A League is the classic example of how IT CAN WORK, it takes time, money and commitment to a long term plan. I for one hope that plan can be found for hockey and many other sports, to free the strangle hold that too few sports have on FREE TO AIR television, but at the end of the day that is business. A sports lover.

TG I"ve been following international hockey for about 35 years, ever since Melbourne hosted an international event at the hockey centre in the early 80s. I went in support of Holland, who were knocked out of the semis by a last minute penalty corner, I think by India, and then Australia defeated India 6-1 in the final (going off memory now). After soccer and basketball, I would see hockey as the most international of all the team sports, but alas, the truth is that the majority of Australians only pay attention to hockey come the Olympics every four years, and then switch off again for four years. To transition from both good participation (which hockey has, being a terrific sport to play), and the national focus being only once every four years means having a national club competition - team sports get attention by having clubs to follow - this is a theme I return to every time similar discussions happen on the Roar about other popular sports such as cricket and rugby - it's not enough to have the international dimension - ongoing media interest and public attention means having club competitions which people support, want to watch, crave news stories, etc. People have more of an emotional attachment to clubs, especially here in Australia, we buy memberships to clubs, not to the Commonwealth of Australia and/or its states - clubs play every weekend during the season, constantly creating its own news and media attention - national teams play every now and then. This is precisely why cricket needed the BBL - putting cricket on the TV almost every night and giving people something to get attached to. It's harder for hockey because it starts a long way back from cricket in terms of public interest, it starts even further back than soccer did - so it's a very long, hard road. But the possibilities are there - we see how dense the sporting landscape is through the Winter months with NRL, AFL and Super Rugby. There is less on during the Summer months, so there are opportunities to put up a competition which can be followed over the Summer (played in the evenings), and with hockey being a shortish game, it could be marketed as a Summer evening family event.

Can we change the name field hockey to just hockey and make ice hockey called ice hockey?

CATS

yessssssssss