Womens Hockey

Womens hockey get a lot less attention in the media than its male counterpart. This is perhaps partly deserved since male hockey has a lot bigger player and fan base. Womens hockey is however one of the fastest growing sports in the world among women. The sport has grown an astonishing 350% in a mere 10 years. The sport is growing fastest in the classic hockey countries such as Finland, Sweden, Canada and the united states. Canada has the largest number of registered female hockey players in the world with a total of 85,624 women players (2010). USA has the second biggest number of registered women players with 61,612 players. After that there is a huge jump to the third biggest nation that is Finland with 4,694 players. In forth place we find Sweden with 3, 425 players. However if you take Finlands and Swedens total population into consideration they actually have more women players than the US. Finland for an example has 5 million inhabitants while the united states is estimated to have 312 million inhabitants. Or over 62 times more, which applied to the population of Finland would mean that Finland would have almost 300 000 women players if Finland had the same population as the US. Canada is number one even if the total population is considered but the difference is smaller.

There are a lot of womens league on all levels. Examples in the US and Canada include the Canadian Women's Hockey League, the Mid-Atlantic Women's Hockey League and the Western Women's Hockey League. Womens hockey is today an Olympic sport in the winter Olympics which it has been since the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.. The womens world championships has been played 9 times to date. The womens world championship is now played every year but up until 2010 it was not played during olympic years. The first world championship for women was held in 1990. To find information about the results please see the tables at the bottom of the page.

Womens ice hockey large use the same rules as mens ice hockey but there are some differences. One such difference is that international womens hockey to not allow body checking. This was due to the big difference in size between players from different nations and the danger that could cause to the women in the teams from some nations that were considerable smaller than the women in some other teams.

Tournament Results

Medal Table