Hockey

How Many Countries Play Ice Hockey?   The Friendship League has now played hockey in 6 countries, with many more destinations planned for the near future. People are often very surprised to learn that some of these destinations, including Kenya and Turkmenistan, have ice at all - let alone full ice hockey programs. But the truth is, ice hockey is far more common around the world than you might think. The game is played regularly across 6 continents and in some of the countries that you’d least expect. In this…

In the early days of the Friendship League, our primary ambition was to help bring the Special Olympics to North Korea. Hockey (at that point) served mainly as a platform to develop relationships with the North Korean sports community.  Lucky for us, our strategy of using sport as an engagement tool worked quite well – hockey turned out to be an excellent tool for creating dialogue with the reclusive government in Pyongyang. After a few runs of the Pyongyang Ice Hockey League, we’d developed sufficient connections and trust locally to…