Field Hockey Stick - Kinked-shaft & Recurve Heads.

Kinked-shaft & Recurve Heads.

The traditional small arc to the heel edge of the hockey stick had the effect of setting the stick-head back slightly. This aspect of stick design (of which the AREC hockey stick was an extreme example) was first explored just prior to the Men's Hockey World Cup of 1986 and resulted in the production of hockey sticks with a stick-head considerably more set-back in relation to the handle. The original design, aligning the centre line of the handle with the centre of the ball, in the common striking position, featured a counterbalancing 'kink' or protrusion to the handle on the 'toe' edge of the handle, just above the head of the stick. This invention of the 'kinked-shaft' and set-back head stick led directly to rules governing the amount of bend or 'permitted deviation' to the 'edge sides' of the hockey stick handle. Some of these were later termed 'recurve' heads (a description given to a later style, produced by an Australian manufacturer, without the patented 'kink' feature.)

The early extremes in stick design were in those sticks intended for use by goalkeepers. The aim was simply to present the maximum stopping area to the ball. The first was the extended hook, (far left) which was made with a toe of approximately 150mm (6"). When sticks with an upturn substantially more than that (some more than half the length of the handle) began to appear, which was around 1988, the FIH placed a limit of 100mm (4") on the upturn of the toe of the head.

In 1990 a plywood cutout of a stick with multiple kinks in the shaft was presented to the FIH for comment, the intention was to produce it as a goalkeeper's stick. Having limited the toe upturn only two years previously the FIH saw this as mockery and issued a press release, in April 1990, proposing a ban on all hockey sticks with 'non-straight' handles to take effect after the Barcelona Olympics of that year. There was protest from those who had been marketing sticks with set-back heads and or kinked shafts and it was in any case not a sensible proposal because there is no such thing as a hockey stick with a perfectly straight handle. The result was the withdrawal of the proposed ban and the imposition of 'limits of deviation', which permitted one bend to either side of the handle to a maximum of 20mm on each side. In 1993 a diagram explaining the permitted deviation was included in the Rules of Hockey. Previously the only restraint on the configuration of a hockey stick was that it had to pass through a ring of 2" diameter (later adjusted to 51mm - 2" rounded up to the nearest millimeter).