Hurling Outside Ireland - North America

North America

Further information: Canada GAA, New York GAA and North American GAA

One of the earliest references to the game of hurling on the North American continent dates from St. John's, Newfoundland in the 1780s. In a colony where many of the people were immigrants from County Waterford and County Kilkenny, games of hurling were common. The Catholic Bishop of St. John's, Rev. James O'Donel, complains in his letters to the Governor that faction fights would frequently break out among the audiences at games of hurling. Also, in New York City, newspaper reports from 1782 describe a Saint Patrick's Day game played in an open space behind the Jewish cemetery, remnants of which lie at 55 St. James Place in Chinatown, New York. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the players were most likely British officers from the New York garrison. After the end of the American Revolution, references to hurling cease in American newspapers until the aftermath of the Potato Famine.

Newspaper reports from the 1850s refer to occasional matches played in San Francisco, Hoboken, New Jersey, and New York City. The first game of hurling played under GAA rules outside of Ireland was played on Boston Common in June 1886. In 1888, an American tour by fifty Gaelic athletes from Ireland created enough interest among Irish Americans to lay the groundwork for the North American GAA. By the end of 1889, almost a dozen GAA clubs existed in America, many of them in and around New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Later, clubs were formed in Boston, Cleveland, and many other centers of Irish America. American teams competed in the short lived revival of the Tailteann Games in 1928 and 1932

In 1910, twenty-two hurlers, composed of an equal number from Chicago and New York, conducted a tour of Ireland, where they played against the County teams from Kilkenny, Tipperary, Limerick, Dublin, and Wexford.

Traditionally a game played by Irish immigrants and discarded by their children, many American hurling teams took to raising money to import players directly from Ireland. In recent years, this has changed considerably with the advent of the Internet. Outside of the traditional North American GAA cities of New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, clubs are springing up in places like West Lafayette, Indiana at Purdue University, Milwaukee (see Milwaukee Hurling Club), Atlanta, Charlotte, St. Louis (see St. Louis Hurling Club), Denver, Colorado, Seattle, Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis-Saint Paul. These clubs are different from older clubs in that they consist of predominantly American-born players who bring a new dimension to the game and actively seek to promote it as a mainstream sport.

On 31 January 2009, the first ever game of hurling to be played between two American collegiate hurling teams took place at Stanford University, California, when the Stanford team took on their rivals from UC Berkeley in a challenge game. This game was organized by the California Collegiate Gaelic Athletic Association, which is recognized by the Western Division Board as the authority for hurling teams at third level education colleges in the area. Cal won the challenge game by 3-10 to 3-9. The two teams then played a two-game aggregate series for the inaugural CCGAA Gary Duffin Memorial Cup. Stanford won the championship- the first ever collegiate cup competition in North America- winning the first match 2-10 to 1-7 on February 21, 2009, and then winning the second match 6-9 to 1-11 on April 18, 2009. Both matches were played at Pairc na nGael on Treasure Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.