Less than a month to go!
With less than a month to go until the 3rd NZ Heritage Hockey Tournament gets underway organisers, participating hockey organisations, Waikato Hockey the hosts, and players are gearing up for one of the most exciting tournaments of the year.
This year we will see defending champs NZ Maori Hockey Senior Mens and Womens teams aim to lift their trophies yet again. The NZ Maori Hockey Senior Womens team is on route to take out the “3-peat” this year after winning both the 1st and 2nd tournaments respectively.
Who's playing this year?
This year we will see NZ Indian Sports Association enter their Mens and Womens teams. NZ Pasifika Hockey have also entered both their Mens and Womens teams. And a change from the past two years where all organisations agreed that NZ Maori Hockey can enter both their Senior Mens and Womens teams along with their Junior Mens and Womens teams.
So what happened to the NZ Heritage Hockey Barbarians teams? Well both those teams last year had a number of Junior Maori players playing in the Barbarians teams. This year it seemed appropriate to enter the NZ Maori Hockey Junior teams as a different invitational pair of teams. Year one Hockey NZ entered their Development Teams, year two NZ Heritage Hockey entered their own Barbarians teams, and now in year three we see the organisations move in a new direction trialing the younger generations.
I guess this means that on the horizon there could be more heritage tournaments that will cover more age groups.
Will there be Live Streaming of the games this year?
The NZ Heritage Hockey Committee have applied for funding with One Foundation to once again broadcast the games online with the help of that brilliant Live Streaming company Local Gecko who reside in Rotorua.
