Replace Sledging With Pledging

Hockey Australia will take Hockey New South Wales’ ‘Respect for Officials’ campaign nationwide at the Under 21s Australian Championships in Sydney, NSW from 4 – 12 July, 2018.

This ground-breaking initiative was launched by Hockey New South Wales in April, 2018 and has successfully encouraged hockey fans, athletes, coaches and supporters to pledge their intention to show respect for officials.

Hockey NSW recently announced that they have collected more than 2,000 signatures as part of the pledge.

Hockey Australia will be supporting this initiative via their digital platforms and through on-ground initiatives at the U21 championships. HA will make pledging mandatory for all athletes, coaches and team managers in a bid to support officials within Australian hockey.

Hockey Australia CEO, Matt Favier said: “We are enthusiastic in our support of initiatives such as the Respect for Officials campaign launched by Hockey NSW. Hockey Australia will continue to grow hockey participation at a grassroots level and campaigns such as this one ensure that our sport is developing across all areas of game development.

This initiative is especially of interest because athletes at all levels look up to and res­­pect their coaches. At the grassroots, club-level coaches are usually the hockey parents. Officials are peers and respect is not necessarily encouraged – in fact it’s not given adequate thought.

Through this campaign, we encourage our hockey clubs, associations and participants to think about how important officials are to every hockey game and that it is of utmost importance to show respect for officials and fellow athletes.”

To support this campaign, Hockey Australia will be encouraging participants of the U21s to pledge before games as well as change their pre-match entry on to the field to highlight the handshake with the umpires as a mark of respect. For awareness, championship officials will be wearing uniforms carrying the logo for the initiative.

Historically, the ‘Play the Whistle’ prize has been awarded to the officials’ choice of best team that have displayed best on-field behaviour in alignment with the spirit of the game. This year, the prize money has been increased to five times the usual value to encourage teams to show respect for officials. This will be announced at the end of the tournament at the awards ceremony.

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