About Yes Hockey

Every stick gets one score out of ten and a five-line scorecard: power, reception, reverse, aerials and feel for an outfield stick, and clearing, blocking, reverse, reach and feel for a goalkeeper’s. The score belongs to one grade of the stick, named on the review, because a 4000 and a 10000 of the same bow are not the same stick.

We say how each review was written. Of the 37 sticks on the site, 3 are hands-on: we played them and the review says for how long and on what turf. The other 34 are desk reviews, scored from the published specs and other people’s testing. Every score carries that label wherever it appears, and only a hands-on review can take the homepage’s lead slot.

No brand pays for a review or a score. We print no prices, because a price on a static page goes stale and a wrong price is worse than none.

Weights, balance points, bow heights and carbon figures are copied from what the brand or a retailer publishes, and we keep a note of the page each grade’s figures came from. Where nobody has published a figure, we print a dash rather than a guess.

The 49 profiles are of real athletes, so every figure on them is sourced and dated: each profile lists its sources and the date its numbers were last checked. A stick is only named in a player’s kit when we can say where we saw it — in match photography, or from the brand — and the profile says which.

The world rankings and the fixtures calendar are read from the FIH’s published feeds and refreshed automatically every day. They are the FIH’s figures, not ours; if they disagree with the FIH’s own site, theirs is right and ours is about to catch up.

Every photograph is credited beside it, with the licence it is used under. If a photograph of yours appears here and you would rather it did not, tell us and it will come down.