In recognition of this trend, women's ice hockey became a medal event for the first time in the 1998 Winter Olympics. In Minnesota, large numbers of girls entered the sport in 1994, when it was sanctioned at the high school level for interscholastic competition. In 1995, high school girls competed in their first state hockey tournament and their male counterparts celebrated their 51st. In that same year, USA Hockey, Inc, estimated that nearly 40,000 Minnesotans under age 19 were playing hockey and reported that Minnesota trailed only Michigan in number of teams registered. Given the soaring popularity of youth hockey in Minnesota, increasing injury rates should be a concern.
Ice hockey is a sport in which injuries are common and some are serious.
3 and the number of serious hockey injuries appears to be increasing. For example, in Canada, the number of catastrophic spinal injuries was 0.7 per year from 1966 through 1980 but increased to 15 per year from 1981 through 1987. The rate of noncatastrophic hockey injuries is high at the community or youth hockey level in the United States. Contusions were the most common injury. We were unable to find any published studies of girls' hockey injuries.