Players from both national teams joined forces to discover every corner where hockey is practiced in the country, through an entertaining contest. More than 70 institutions participated, thus leaving a very valuable record for national hockey.
Between May and June, players from Las Diablas and Los Diablos, with the support of the Federación Chilena de Hockey sobre Césped, they developed an interactive and fun contest to find the places where our sport is practiced.
Divided by areas - North, Metropolitan, Central Coast, South Central and Southern Austral - and with the mission that each institution or hockey club send a video as creative as possible by passing the ball, this contest was started and had a great reception.
“It was super enriching to know that there are teams that we didn't even know existed, that they are there and they train. In other words, there are hockey players everywhere” says Mariana Lagos, Las Diablas midfielder and main driving force - along with Captain Camila Caram - of the initiative.
But how did the idea come about? “The coaches invited us to use this quarantine to our advantage and try to reach the people who always follow us, because it is thanks to them that we have grown as a sport. Deep down, helping people who have also helped us in another way ”says “Meme”. On the other hand, Camila Caram notes that this also had the purpose of assembling a record of all the teams where our sport is played “The idea was to search and find all the places where hockey is played, to be able to later show it and promote it, with the idea that all that information is somewhere, so that anyone who wants to play hockey gets inside and can find that information "
And the result was incredible. 74 teams registered: 12 in the North Area; 20 in the Metropolitan Region; 20 in the Central Coast Area; 18 in the Central South Area; and 18 in the Southern Austral.
Numbers that date from the vast presence of a sport that is growing more and more nationally. Our Head Coach, Alfredo Castro, positively evaluates the performance of this contest "It has been spectacular because it has allowed us to detect many institutions that practice hockey in the regions, which the Federation had not accounted, with which we have increased our mass of institutions of hockey and our number of players in an impressive way… It opens our eyes to how hockey is spreading and developing throughout Chile”.
Along the same lines, Juan Ignacio Amoroso, player of Los Diablos, believes that it was a necessity to create a direct line with all the clubs in the country "I think we had very little information on how big the hockey family is in Chile ... Hockey It has always been very centralized and this was a good opportunity to get to know region hockey ”.
And this they achieved through the contest which, by the way, presented awards to the winners of each area. The main award consisted of a training kit for the winning team.
"This is finally a way of saying that we want hockey to belong to everyone," says Lagos at the end, making it understood that these instances only add to the sport.
Regarding the FEHOCH, Alfredo Castro closes "We are not only staying with this action, but now we are generating direct support for all institutions to train them and integrate them into the national system of the federation."