Indoor hockey outdoors at AMHC FIT

Over the past months, AMHC FIT has played indoor hockey outdoors. The reason for this was a shortage of indoor hall capacity and the desire to still facilitate indoor hockey. Marcel Wijnen – member of the indoor committee – was involved in the realisation of this project on behalf of the association. For AMHC Fit, playing indoor hockey outdoors is an intermediate step towards the desired air dome. For this interim period, they were looking for a way to facilitate more training hours for their members and in doing so came across the modular sports floor. This ultimately led to a pilot in cooperation with the municipality of Amsterdam.

Indoor hockey on a modular sports floor, placed on an existing artificial turf field, outdoors and without a roof did present some challenges. According to Wijnen, frost and snow initially meant that the floor could not be used optimally, but during better weather conditions they were able to test the floor better for use in indoor hockey. They are still searching for which footwear (field or indoor shoes) is best to use on this ‘outdoor’ floor. Ultimately, testing the floor for outdoor indoor hockey is also intended to promote indoor hockey and to make facilitating it possible with lower investments.