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Why Hockey is the Hardest Sport
By: Kellum Dixon
Date: 01/27/25
You may say that the hardest sport is football, baseball, or basketball, but in my opinion that's not true in the slightest. In this article, I will be giving reasons why hockey is the hardest sport, and compare it to other sports to give you examples.
Hockey is a very complex sport for multiple reasons, some being that you are playing one of the most aggressive sports with knives on your feet. It is also very hard to learn to skate, especially with all the gear on you. You also have to learn to hold a hockey stick right and shoot with it. Along with the difficultly of skating, hockey can be aggressive; you get checked into the board, (that means you were slammed into the walls around the rink) and many fist fights too. There have been tons of people who have even died due to the sport, mostly involving the skate hitting someone and killing them. The last reason is the cost, the total of gear and league expenses are well over twenty five hundred dollars. This is why I think hockey is a very dangerous and hardest sport to learn.
Patrice Bergeron is a perfect example of how hazardous hockey is, “he suffered torn rib cartilage in Game 4 of the 2013 Stanley Cup Final, a broken rib on his left side in Game 5 and a separated right shoulder and a punctured left lung in Game 6. The puncture eventually caused the lung to collapse and Bergeron ended up in the hospital following Game 6, spending three days there.”
He also explains how hard and demanding it is to play, saying that “it’s a lot of hard work to race around on a sheet of ice for 60 minutes, even with line changes every minute or so. Intense shifts of high-intensity effort, quick starts, stops, direction changes, fighting for loose pucks, and hard hits add up. The interval nature and physicality of the game makes it uniquely demanding endurance wise.”
But Hockey is not the only sport that is demanding. For instance, football is also a very difficult sport because there is a ton of aggression and lots of players get concussions due to the tackling. You need to be really strong and be pretty healthy to play. It also costs a good amount of money to play, but not quite as much as hockey.
In comparison, I still see hockey as the hardest sport because it is also demanding and takes a lot of energy, but this time you have to learn to skate and take hits on those skates. As for the aggression you do get tackled in football, but in hockey you get checked and get into fist sights while you are still on skates. Football also has a pretty big ball compared to the three inch long puck. For these reasons I see hockey as a harder sport than football. Players have to withstand tons of aggression while being on skates, having a smaller ball / puck to work with, and use a hockey stick on top of all that.
Next is basketball, which is an aggressive sport and also demanding because you have to learn to play defense, run up and down the court, and shoot the basketball. This makes it a hard sport to play, but the cost is much lower, averaging $1020 for a youth club season. Hockey is more demanding in my opinion because you have to wear shoulder pads and learn to skate. On top of that you have to learn to handle the puck. You may have to dribble in basketball, but the puck is much smaller than the basketball, which makes it harder. So in conclusion, hockey is a harder sport than basketball.
Finally, we have to compare it to baseball. This sport involves lots of running, strength, and hand eye coordination. That alone makes this a hard sport to play, but hockey is more expensive, more aggressive, and you need good hand eye coordination too! Not only that but you have to learn to skate, so I have to give the point to hockey.
In the end, my opinion stays the same with Hockey as the most complicated sport to play because of its aggressiveness, puck handling, ice skating, and more.
Sources:
https://www.jerseywatch.com/blog/youth-Football-team-startup-costs
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