A Canadian restaurant named its soup of the day American Tears last Friday.
Team USA was bested once again by its Canadian neighbors at the Olympic Games in Sochi. If that’s not bad enough, they lost the bronze medal game to Finland too.
But if USA Hockey sticks with its decision to delay the introduction of body checking until players are older, America will fall even lower in the hockey lineup. In order to produce the best players, USA Hockey should introduce checking earlier or ban it all together.
Understandably, some fans are quick to stand up and rah that checking adds entertainment value and manliness to the game. But National Hockey League games have much less checking than amateur hockey leagues, and millions more people watch the NHL games. Checking only adds injuries while decreasing the game’s skill level.
Checking is not allowed in women’s hockey leagues. Head coach of the Brock Badgers women’s hockey team Todd Erskine said in an interview with The Western Gazette that it makes hockey a more skillful game.
“Without body checking, there’s more of an emphasis on other skills like skating, passing and shooting,” Erskine said. “I find you can get more of a flow to a game and definitely more of a shift away from the mentality in men’s games that allows things to get out of hand.”
And it has gotten out of hand.
The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons ranked hockey as the most dangerous sport in the United States for nonfatal catastrophic injuries, and reported that more than 63,000 hockey-related injuries are treated each year. Checking is the cause of about 75 percent of all major injuries that happen in the sport.
Checking was traditionally introduced to the players when they reached the Pee Wee level, around the age of 10 or 11. In 2011, USA Hockey prohibited body checking until players reached the Bantam level, which is made up of 13-and 14-year-olds, in order to reduce the number of injuries. Studies, however, show that the number of injuries has not changed. In fact, it has just made the injuries worse.
A study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by the University of Calgary followed two leagues, one that allowed checking at the age of 11, and the other not until 13. After two years, the study concluded that both leagues had around the same amount of checking-related injuries, but injuries that caused the players to take more than seven days off of playing time increased by 33 percent when checking was introduced later.
Prolonging the introduction of checking will not decrease injuries, it will only make the injuries worse.
These findings make sense. 11- and 12-year-olds are in their prime years for learning new skills and will be able to perfect their checking while not being able to hit too hard. However, 13-and 14-year-old boys don’t know how to control their strength. Some have gone through major growth spurts while others have not. Adding inexperienced checking to the game at this point in their lives has proven disastrous.
My 13-year-old brother is just starting to learn how to check. In AAA teams, the most competitive teams in his league, coaches aren’t focusing as much on the players’ skill set during try-outs. Instead, they want to stack their team with size. They know smaller kids will be the ones to get hurt this year because none of the players know how to hit.
Just after two years of the checking-rule change, American hockey is being transformed to a size game, like football or basketball, rather than a game of meritocracy.
The Olympic Games featured a mix of amateur and NHL players. The two-week event has left at least seven prominent NHL players benched for their regular season games due to injuries sustained from overzealous body-checks.
These injuries are yet another reason for USA Hockey to revoke their decision to delay checking until the Bantam level. Better yet, the hockey community should ban it from the game entirely. Without action, checking will continue to force talented American players out of the game prematurely.
