History
Floorball, also known as unihockey, plastic bandy, floor bandy and soft bandy, was originally developed during the 1960s as a game for schoolchildren in Sweden. Several other countries have come up with similar games.
Some writers trace floorball's origin to floor hockey, an American game that uses a plastic puck and sticks. (Floor hockey, in turn, probably derived from street hockey.) According to this account, floor hockey went to Europe, where the puck was replaced by a plastic ball. That's possible, but documentation seems to be lacking.
In any event, it was in Sweden that floorball took root and developed as a sport for adults. Specifically, it began in Sala, Sweden, in 1979, when a group of recent secondary school graduates led by Christer Gustavsson began to play floorball as they had learned it during their school days. That meant a relatively small playing area, small goals, and no goalie.
The game didn't prove satisfactory at their age, though, so they decided to move the game to a larger court, enlarge the goals, and add a goalie. That worked. The Sala Floorball Club was formally organized on Sept. 21, 1979, and the new sport caught on quickly, not just in Sala but throughout Sweden.
The first national championship tournament was held in October of 1980. Eighteen teams entered.
Fifteen local associations founded the Swedish Floorball Federation at a meeting at Sala in November of 1981. By 1984, there were more than a hundred local and regional clubs in Sweden; that number went over a thousand in 1990.
In the meantime, floorball spread to other countries. The first international match was played by Swedish and Finnish national teams in September of 1985. Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland founded the International Floorball Federation (IFF) less than a year later, in April of 1986.
The IFF had 18 member countries by 1996, when Sweden hosted the first world championship for men. More than 15,000 spectators attended the final match. The first women's world championship was staged in 1997.
There are now 32 member associations in the IFF, representing more than 3,500 Clubs and 200,000 players.
Floorball was introduced to the United States by a Swedish student who organized a club at MIT in 1991. Over the next several years, other clubs were organized by students or workers from Scandinavia. One such club was established in 1994 at the California Institute of Technology.
Adam Troy of Cal Tech led an attempt to form a national team to compete in the 1998 world championships. Lack of money prevented sending a team, but Troy's efforts did lead to the founding of the U. S. Floorball Asssociation (USFA), which was originally based at Cal Tech. A national men's team was finally organized for the 2001 world championships in 2001 and a women's team took part in 2003.
How It's Played
Floorball is played on an indoor court, 40 meters long and 20 meters wide, surrounded by a rink of plastic or wooden boards 50 centimeters (about 19½ inches) high, with rounded corners. The goals are 160 centimeters wide by 115 centimeters high (about 63 by 45 inches).
There are six players on each team, including a goaltender. A game is made up of three 20-minute periods.
Each player, except the goaltender, uses a plastic stick. The plastic ball is 7.2 centimeters (about 2.8 inches) in diameter.
Field players are not allowed to touch the ball with the head, hand, or arm. The goalkeeper can handle the ball only while part of his or her body is touching the floor within the goal crease.
Hitting the ball with the stick while it is above the knee is forbidden, but kicking the ball onto the player's own stick is okay.
Use of the body isn't permitted. Most infractions are penalized by awarding the other team a free kick. Personal fouls, however, are penalized as in ice hockey, with the offending player leaving the playing area without being replaced for a specified period, usually two minutes.