Final week, the KNVB, the nationwide governing physique for hockey within the Netherlands, withdrew from February’s EuroHockey indoor championships after which introduced just a few days in the past that it was suspending its nationwide indoor program completely.
In worldwide sports activities phrases, this may be the equal of USA Basketball dropping its 3×3 participation, or Brazil not providing indoor soccer or seaside soccer packages, regardless of notable success in these sub-disciplines of their respective sports activities. .
Why do the gents of Dutch hockey do that? They point out one of many curses of soccer: enjoying too many video games in the midst of a given 12 months.
In line with The Hockey Paper, the Dutch governing physique cited “an excessive amount of strain on the resilience of gamers and supervisors.”
Given what we talked about yesterday – the addition of Lacrosse Sixes to the Olympic Video games – I significantly query the Dutch technique to realize full assist for the indoor nationwide crew program.
That the Netherlands – a frontrunner within the sport for generations – doesn’t have a nationwide crew competing in a model of hockey that has been proven to enhance the abilities and decision-making of particular person gamers is counter-intuitive at greatest and damaging at worst.