Hockey in New Zealand

Nic Woods works twenty hours a week in Hamburg, and that is exactly why he can train well. A full-time job alongside top-level hockey, as back home in New Zealand, would make that impossible. Almost the entire Black Sticks squad lives this way: scattered across European clubs, semi-amateur, with a federation that, after budget cuts of nearly 1.7 million dollars, twice deliberately turned down the Pro League. And yet the men sit around eleventh in the world, fifty years after the Olympic gold of Montreal 1976.

How an island nation at the other end of the world holds its place among the global elite with a fraction of the budget and a self-chosen isolation, and what that means for their World Cup in Amstelveen against the Netherlands, Argentina and Japan: read on in the full dossier.

When Josephine Murray made her debut for New Zealand in Darwin in September 2025, it was the culmination of a remarkable journey. Born in Christchurch, raised in Amsterdam, shaped in the Dutch youth system with which she became a world champion in 2021, she ultimately chose the country of her birth. On her very first evening she immediately provided the assist for the winning goal. Murray is not the exception but the pattern: the Black Sticks Women are a team that sends its talent out into the world and brings diaspora players back home to stay in the top ten.

The dossier tells how a remote island nation, which gave up its national training base and let the expensive Pro League go after a multi-million-dollar funding cut, still holds its own among the best. About goalkeeper Grace O'Hanlon, in 2025 the first New Zealander ever voted FIH Goalkeeper of the Year. About a team that defends stubbornly, scores against the run of play and decides matches on shoot-outs. And about a World Cup that brings them back to the Netherlands and Belgium, where their finest story ever began.