The mainstream news media has never exactly been on the cutting edge of pop culture and recreation, but the New York Times did a nice job with a recent story.
Called “It’s Called Broomball And Yes, It’s Grueling,” the NYT story focused on a group of players who play pickup broomball in Brooklyn. It was cool to see our sport featured prominently in such a high-profile publication.
Unlike some other news coverage of broomball, this author did his research and did a nice job of understanding and explaining the sport. He includes quotes from several players who talk about the level of effort and exertion required to play the game. The article includes a mention of the fact that players often wear special broomball shoes designed to provide balance and traction on the slippery surface and that they use different helmets, knee pads, and broomball sticks.
The interesting thing about the Brooklyn broomball setup is that the games are pickup. Most of the broomball recreation opportunities that currently exist in the U.S. are broomball leagues that allows established teams to compete over the course of several weeks. It’s often difficult to find enough people to come out to weekly broomball pickup games, but obviously it works in a huge city like New York.
The New York Times piece did a nice job of describing the drama and excitement of a typical broomball game, but didn’t delve too deeply into the history of broomball, aside from mentioning that it started in Canada and was first played with actual brooms.
Articles like this will probably become ore frequent as the sport continues to grow in popularity and spread to more of the country and the world. Between word of mouth and the internet, broomball will definitely keep exploding in the years to come. We’ll keep our eyes open for other articles like this whenever we see them.