Swedish Girls’s Hockey League to OK bodychecking for 2022-23 season

The Swedish Girls’s Hockey League (SDHL) will enable bodychecking subsequent season, though it stays banned by the Worldwide Ice Hockey Federation for girls’s video games.

The SDHL introduced on Friday that it’s implementing a pilot program for the 2022-23 season, permitting sure sorts of hits, reminiscent of alongside the boards. One examine that continues to be prohibited is a “north-south” open-ice hit.

“We have now tried to pursue the checking challenge earlier than at IIHF however haven’t been heard. It feels inspiring that we now decide for our personal league and never solely pave the way in which for Swedish girls’s hockey however for your entire girls’s hockey world,” Gizela Ahlgren Bloom, the sports activities supervisor for the SDHL, stated in a press release. “A big majority of the gamers have additionally been constructive about testing this, so we predict it will prove properly and that much more individuals will need to go to the arenas and watch actually entertaining hockey.”

The SDHL stated it made this resolution with the Zero Imaginative and prescient undertaking that has aimed to forestall concussions in Swedish hockey. In accordance with the league, the previous 4 seasons have seen a rise in bodily play however the incidence of concussions has decreased by 75%. It cites higher on-ice consciousness and modifications to how gamers work together bodily on the ice as elements.

“In latest seasons, we have now launched extra bodily play with the ambition of having the ability to open up for checking in SDHL,” Ahlgren Bloom stated.

The IIHF has banned checking in girls’s hockey since round 1992. Any participant who delivers a examine to an opponent in an IIHF-sanctioned sport may be given a minor, main or match penalty. There may be physique contact allowed in pursuit of the puck, however gamers are prohibited from utilizing the board to “make contact with an opponent to eradicate her from the play, push her into the boards, or pin her alongside the boards. All of those actions point out an absence of curiosity in gaining possession of the puck.”

Swedish girls’s nationwide workforce coach Ulf Lundberg advised Swedish broadcaster SVT that permitting hitting within the SDHL will make for more durable gamers in worldwide video games. “Worldwide video games are powerful, and to be nearer to the extent of different nations, we have to get extra toughness within the sport. I believe we get extra creativity within the sport,” he stated.

David Bergman, head of officiating within the SDHL, stated legalized checking will make it simpler for referees to officiate video games.

The pilot program may even be applied in Damettan, Sweden’s second-tier girls’s hockey league.