Hong Kong’s Canada-based ball hockey team – another benefit of immigration waves to the country

It sounds worlds apart: the snowy hinterlands of Edmonton, Alberta, a sprawling capital city of around 1.8 million people in the northern part of one of country’s prairie provinces. Then there’s Hong Kong, a bustling Asian metropolis smack in the middle of a hot, sweaty jungle climate.

Turns out these two seemingly polar opposites have more in common than one might think. Hong Kong’s ball hockey team, which has competed internationally since 2009, is now based out of Edmonton and features an array of second and third generation Asian Canadians who have taken to the sport.

Ball hockey is played on a ice hockey rink sans the ice (concrete or modular plastic flooring fills in). The sport is derived from ice hockey and was originally a way for players to keep in shape during summer months as refrigeration costs for arenas are expensive during hot weather. The game’s modern version apparently started in the 1960s in a few rinks across Canada and has since grown into an international sport that has world championships every two years. Retired National Hockey League player and Canadian Alexandre Burrows is in the International Ball Hockey Hall of Fame, showcasing the sport’s long reach.

Hong Kong’s team had an interesting start and a connection to a similarly diminutive representative team. Back in the mid-2000s, Hong Kong expat Darren Winia, who was eligible to play for the Cayman Islands’ ball hockey team (players must have at least one grandparent who was born in the country, or hold citizenship according to the International Street & Ball Hockey Federation), and wanted to help Hong Kong set up their international team. So Winia registered the local league with the ISBHF, and in 2009 Hong Kong competed at the world championships in the B pool. The ISBHF breaks its championships into two categories featuring an emerging nations division.