Hoop rolling
Encyclopedia
Hoop rolling, also called hoop trundling, is both a sport and a child's game in which a large hoop is rolled along the ground, generally by means of an implement wielded by the player. The aim of the game is to keep the hoop upright for long periods of time or to do various tricks.
Hoop rolling has been documented since antiquity in Africa, Asia and Europe. Played as a target game it is an ancient tradition among widely dispersed aboriginal societies. In Asia, the earliest records date from Ancient China, and in Europe from Ancient Greece.
In the West, the most common materials for the equipment have been wood and metal. Wooden hoops, driven with a stick about one foot long, are struck with the center or the 2/3 point of the stick in order to ensure good progress. Metal hoops, instead of being struck, are often guided by a metal hook.
, and the hoop was also used for tumbling and dance with different techniques. Although a popular form of recreation, hoop rolling was not featured in competition at the major sports festivals
.
Hoops, also called krikoi, were probably made of bronze, iron, or copper, and were driven with a stick called the elater. The hoop was sized according to the player, as it had to come up to the level of the chest. Greek vases generally show the elater as a short straight stick. The sport was regarded as healthful, and was recommended by Hippocrates
for strengthening weak constitutions. Even very young children would play with hoops, a fact immortalized by Euripides
in his play Medea, in which the two young sons meet their death at their mother's hands as they return from driving hoops.
The hoop thus held symbolic meanings in Greek myth and culture. A bronze hoop was one of the toys of the infant Dionysus
, and hoop driving is an attribute of Ganymede
, often depicted on Greek
vase paintings from the fifth c. BCE. Images of the hoop are sometimes presented in the context of ancient Greek pederastic tradition
.
term for hoop is also trochus, at times referred to as the "Greek hoop." The stick was known as a clavis or radius, had the shape of a key, and was made of metal with a wooden handle. Roman hoops were fitted with metal rings that slid freely along the rim. According to Martial
, this was done so that the tinkling of the rings would warn passers by of the hoop's approach: "Why do these jingling rings move about upon the rolling wheel? In order that the passers-by may get out of the way of the hoop."(14. CLXIX) He also indicates that the metal tires of wooden cart wheels could be used as hoops: "A wheel must be protected. You make me a useful present. It will be a hoop to children, but to me a tyre for my wheel."(14. CLXVIII) Martial also mentions the sport was practiced by Sarmatian
boys, who rolled their hoops on the frozen Danube
river. According to Strabo
, one of the popular Roman venues for practicing the sport was the Campus Martius
, which was large enough to accommodate a wide variety of activities.
The Roman game was to roll the hoop while throwing a spear or stick through it. For Romans, this was more an entertainment and military development not a philosophical activity. Several ancient sources praise the sport. According to Horace
hoop driving was one of the manly sports. Ovid
in his Tristia
is more specific, putting the sport in the same category with horsemanship, javelin throwing and weapon practice: Usus equi nunc est, levibus nunc luditur armis, Nunc pila, nunc celeri volvitur orbe trochus. It was also presented as a virtue in the Distichs of Cato
, which enjoin youth to Trocho lude; aleam fuge – "Play with the hoop, flee the dice." A 2nd c. CE medical text by Antyllus
, preserved in an anthology of Oribasius
, Emperor Julian
's physician, describes hoop rolling as a form of physical and mental therapy. Antyllus indicates that at first the player should roll the hoop maintaining an upright posture, but after warming up he can begin to jump and run through the hoop. Such exercises, he holds, are best done before a meal or a bath, as with any physical exercise.
The game was also a common pastime of African village children on the Tanganyka plateau, and not long after it is recorded in the Freetown
settler community. In China the game may well go back to 1000 BCE or further. Christian missionaries encountered it there in the 19th century. Children in late Edo period
Japan also were known to play the game.
In English the sport is known by several names, hoop and stick, bowling hoops, or gird and cleek in Scotland
, where the gird is the hoop and the cleek, the stick.
In the west around the end of the 19th century, the game was played by boys up to about twelve years of age. Hoops would at times have pairs of tin squares nailed to the inside of the circle, to jingle as the hoop was rolled. Up to a dozen such pairs of rattles might be placed around the rim of the hoop. Some preferred the ashen hoops, round on the outside and flat on the inside, to the ones made of iron, as the latter could break windows and hurt the legs of the passers by and horses.
Conflict games such as "hoop battle" or "tournament" can also be played. For this game boys organize into opposing teams that drive their hoops against each other with the aim of knocking down as many of the opponents' hoops as possible. Only those hoops which fall as a result of a strike by another hoop are counted out. In some parts of England boys played a similar game called "encounters," where two boys would drive their hoops against each other, the one whose hoop was left standing being the winner.
The "hoop hunt" is yet another game, in which one or more hoops are allowed to roll down a hill, with the double aim of rolling as far as possible and then of locating the hoop wherever it may have ended up.
. Throughout the 1840s a barrage of denunciations appeared in the papers against "The Hoop Nuisance," in which their iron hoops were blamed for inflicting severe injuries to pedestrians' shins The London police attempted to eradicate the practice, confiscating the iron hoops of boys and even of girls trundling them through the streets and parks. That campaign however seems to have failed, as it was accompanied by renewed complaints about the increase of the nuisance.
Other writers mocked the complainers as grumblers depriving the "juvenile community" of a healthy and harmless pastime that had been practiced for hundreds of years "without any apparent inconvenience to the public at large." The passion for passing laws was ridiculed: "Enact, say our modern philosophers, enact. Pass statute after statute. Regulate with exquisite minuteness the cries of the baby in the cradle, the laughter of the hoop-trundling boy, the murmurrings of the toothless old man." In the 1860s the anti-trundling campaign was taken up by Charles Babbage
, who blamed the boys for driving iron hoops under horses' legs, with the result that the rider is thrown and very often the horse breaks a leg. Babbage achieved a certain notoriety in this matter, being denounced in debate in Commons in 1864 for "commencing a crusade against the popular game of tip-cat
and the trundling of hoops."
The fuss over boys playing with hoops reached halfway around the globe. In the Colony of Tasmania
boys trundling hoops were blamed for endangering horsemen and rending ladies' dresses, and the Hobart
paper called for their banishment to the suburbs, bye-laws, and police attention.
Not only schoolboys, but even graduate students at Cambridge
enjoyed trundling hoops after their lectures. The practice, however, was brought to an end sometime before 1816, by means of a statute that forbade Masters of Arts to roll hoops or play marbles.
By the early 19th century the game was already part of the standard physical education of girls, together with jumping rope and dumbbells. Girls from four to fourteen could be seen by the hundreds, trundling their hoops across the grass in the London parks. Though held to be common in the early years of the 19th century, the simplicity and innocence of those years was alleged to have been replaced by the 1850s with a precocious maturity, where "Instead of trundling hoops, urchins smoke cigars."
In the mid-19th century bent ash was favored as material for making wooden hoops. In early 20th c. England girls played with a wooden hoop driven with a wooden stick, while boys' hoops were made of metal and the sticks were key-shaped and also made of metal. In some locations hoops with spokes and bells were available in stores but were disdained by boys.
. Though the forms of the game exhibited great variation, generally certain elements were present, namely a prepared terrain over which a disc or hoop was rolled at high speed, at which implements similar to spears were thrown. The game when played by adults was often associated with gambling and often very valuable prizes, such as horses, exchanged hands. The game has been played by tribes such as the Arapaho
, the Omaha
, the Pawnee and many others.
Since hoop and stick involves spear throwing it is thought to predate the introduction of the bow and arrow that took place around 500 CE. In the California
region in the 18th century it was widespread and known as takersia. Canadian
Eskimo
players divide into two groups. While the first group rolls the hoops, a large and a small one, the players in the other group attempt to throw spears through the hoops. The Cheyenne
named two months of the year after the game: January is known as Ok sey' e shi his, "Hoop-and-stick game moon," and February as Mak ok sey' i shi, "Big hoop-and-stick game moon." Among the Blackfeet
, children would play the game by throwing a feathered stick through the rolling hoop.
Among the European settlers, hoop-rolling was a seasonal sport, seeing the greatest activity in the winter. Children, beside rolling the hoops, also tossed them back and forth, catching them on their sticks. In the 1830s hoop trundling was seen as an activity so characteristic of the young that it was adopted by a fanatic sect in Kentucky
whose members mimicked children's activities in order to gain access to heaven
. Hoop driving was also seen as a remedy for the sedentary and overprotected lives led by many American girls of the mid-19th century. The game was popular with both girls and boys: in a 1898 survey of 1000 boys and 1000 girls in Massachusetts
, both the girls and the boys named hoop and stick their favorite toy. In Ohio
, the wood of the American elm (Ulmus americana) was particularly valued for making hoop-poles.
The Wellesley College Hoop Rolling Contest is an annual spring tradition that dates back to 1895, and is only open to graduating seniors on that college's May Day celebration.
Hoop rolling has been documented since antiquity in Africa, Asia and Europe. Played as a target game it is an ancient tradition among widely dispersed aboriginal societies. In Asia, the earliest records date from Ancient China, and in Europe from Ancient Greece.
In the West, the most common materials for the equipment have been wood and metal. Wooden hoops, driven with a stick about one foot long, are struck with the center or the 2/3 point of the stick in order to ensure good progress. Metal hoops, instead of being struck, are often guided by a metal hook.
History
A version of hoop rolling played as a target game is encountered as an ancient tradition among aboriginal peoples in many parts of the world. The game, known as hoop-and-pole, is ubiquitous throughout most of Africa. It is also found on other continents. In America, where it has been played by a great number of unrelated tribes and is known in English as hoop-and-stick or hoop-and-dart, the game has exhibited many variations of materials and size of implements and rules of play. It is postulated that its wide distribution is a factor of the rich symbolical possibilities of the game, rather than indicating radial diffusion from a single center of invention.Ancient Greece
The Greeks referred to the hoop as the trochus. Hoop rolling was practiced in the gymnasiumGymnasium (ancient Greece)
The gymnasium in ancient Greece functioned as a training facility for competitors in public games. It was also a place for socializing and engaging in intellectual pursuits. The name comes from the Ancient Greek term gymnós meaning "naked". Athletes competed in the nude, a practice said to...
, and the hoop was also used for tumbling and dance with different techniques. Although a popular form of recreation, hoop rolling was not featured in competition at the major sports festivals
Panhellenic Games
Panhellenic Games is the collective term for four separate sports festivals held in ancient Greece. The four Games were:-Description:The Games took place in a four-year cycle known as the Olympiad, which was one of the ways the Greeks measured time...
.
Hoops, also called krikoi, were probably made of bronze, iron, or copper, and were driven with a stick called the elater. The hoop was sized according to the player, as it had to come up to the level of the chest. Greek vases generally show the elater as a short straight stick. The sport was regarded as healthful, and was recommended by Hippocrates
Hippocrates
Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos was an ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles , and is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine...
for strengthening weak constitutions. Even very young children would play with hoops, a fact immortalized by Euripides
Euripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
in his play Medea, in which the two young sons meet their death at their mother's hands as they return from driving hoops.
The hoop thus held symbolic meanings in Greek myth and culture. A bronze hoop was one of the toys of the infant Dionysus
Dionysus
Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
, and hoop driving is an attribute of Ganymede
Ganymede (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Ganymede is a divine hero whose homeland was Troy. Homer describes Ganymede as the most beautiful of mortals. In the best-known myth, he is abducted by Zeus, in the form of an eagle, to serve as cup-bearer in Olympus. Some interpretations of the myth treat it as an allegory of...
, often depicted on Greek
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
vase paintings from the fifth c. BCE. Images of the hoop are sometimes presented in the context of ancient Greek pederastic tradition
Pederasty in ancient Greece
Pederasty in ancient Greece was a socially acknowledged relationship between an adult and a younger male usually in his teens. It was characteristic of the Archaic and Classical periods...
.
Ancient Rome and Byzantium
The Romans learned hoop driving from the Greeks and generally held the sport in high regard. The LatinLatin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
term for hoop is also trochus, at times referred to as the "Greek hoop." The stick was known as a clavis or radius, had the shape of a key, and was made of metal with a wooden handle. Roman hoops were fitted with metal rings that slid freely along the rim. According to Martial
Martial
Marcus Valerius Martialis , was a Latin poet from Hispania best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan...
, this was done so that the tinkling of the rings would warn passers by of the hoop's approach: "Why do these jingling rings move about upon the rolling wheel? In order that the passers-by may get out of the way of the hoop."(14. CLXIX) He also indicates that the metal tires of wooden cart wheels could be used as hoops: "A wheel must be protected. You make me a useful present. It will be a hoop to children, but to me a tyre for my wheel."(14. CLXVIII) Martial also mentions the sport was practiced by Sarmatian
Sarmatians
The Iron Age Sarmatians were an Iranian people in Classical Antiquity, flourishing from about the 5th century BC to the 4th century AD....
boys, who rolled their hoops on the frozen Danube
Danube
The Danube is a river in the Central Europe and the Europe's second longest river after the Volga. It is classified as an international waterway....
river. According to Strabo
Strabo
Strabo, also written Strabon was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.-Life:Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus , a city which he said was situated the approximate equivalent of 75 km from the Black Sea...
, one of the popular Roman venues for practicing the sport was the Campus Martius
Campus Martius
The Campus Martius , was a publicly owned area of ancient Rome about in extent. In the Middle Ages, it was the most populous area of Rome...
, which was large enough to accommodate a wide variety of activities.
The Roman game was to roll the hoop while throwing a spear or stick through it. For Romans, this was more an entertainment and military development not a philosophical activity. Several ancient sources praise the sport. According to Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
hoop driving was one of the manly sports. Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
in his Tristia
Tristia
The Tristia is a collection of letters written in elegiac couplets by the Augustan poet Ovid during his exile from Rome. Despite five books of his copious bewailing of his fate, the immediate cause of Augustus's banishment of the greatest living Latin poet to Pontus in 8 AD remains a mystery...
is more specific, putting the sport in the same category with horsemanship, javelin throwing and weapon practice: Usus equi nunc est, levibus nunc luditur armis, Nunc pila, nunc celeri volvitur orbe trochus. It was also presented as a virtue in the Distichs of Cato
Distichs of Cato
The Distichs of Cato , is a Latin collection of proverbial wisdom and morality by an unknown author named Dionysius Cato from the 3rd or 4th century AD. The Cato was the most popular medieval schoolbook for teaching Latin, prized not only as a Latin textbook, but as a moral compass...
, which enjoin youth to Trocho lude; aleam fuge – "Play with the hoop, flee the dice." A 2nd c. CE medical text by Antyllus
Antyllus
For the son of Mark Antony, see Marcus Antonius AntyllusAntyllus was a Greek surgeon, who lived in the 2nd century AD in Rome. He is most notable for his method of treatment of aneurysms...
, preserved in an anthology of Oribasius
Oribasius
Oribasius or Oreibasius was a Greek medical writer and the personal physician of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. He studied at Alexandria under physician Zeno of Cyprus before joining Julian's retinue. He was involved in Julian's coronation in 361, and remained with the emperor until...
, Emperor Julian
Julian the Apostate
Julian "the Apostate" , commonly known as Julian, or also Julian the Philosopher, was Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 and a noted philosopher and Greek writer....
's physician, describes hoop rolling as a form of physical and mental therapy. Antyllus indicates that at first the player should roll the hoop maintaining an upright posture, but after warming up he can begin to jump and run through the hoop. Such exercises, he holds, are best done before a meal or a bath, as with any physical exercise.
Modern usage
Early 19th century travellers saw children playing with hoops over much of Europe and beyond.The game was also a common pastime of African village children on the Tanganyka plateau, and not long after it is recorded in the Freetown
Freetown
Freetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone, a country in West Africa. It is a major port city on the Atlantic Ocean located in the Western Area of the country, and had a city proper population of 772,873 at the 2004 census. The city is the economic, financial, and cultural center of...
settler community. In China the game may well go back to 1000 BCE or further. Christian missionaries encountered it there in the 19th century. Children in late Edo period
Edo period
The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....
Japan also were known to play the game.
In English the sport is known by several names, hoop and stick, bowling hoops, or gird and cleek in Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, where the gird is the hoop and the cleek, the stick.
In the west around the end of the 19th century, the game was played by boys up to about twelve years of age. Hoops would at times have pairs of tin squares nailed to the inside of the circle, to jingle as the hoop was rolled. Up to a dozen such pairs of rattles might be placed around the rim of the hoop. Some preferred the ashen hoops, round on the outside and flat on the inside, to the ones made of iron, as the latter could break windows and hurt the legs of the passers by and horses.
Games
Among the games played with the hoops, besides simply trundling them which is a matter of driving them forward while keeping them upright, are hoop races, as well as games of dexterity. Among these are "toll," in which the player has to drive his hoop between two stones placed two to three inches apart without touching either one. Another such game is "turnpike" in which one player drives the hoop between pairs of objects such as bricks at first placed so that the opening is about a foot wide, each gate kept by a different player. After running all the gates the openings are made smaller by one inch and the player trundling the hoop runs the course again. The process repeats until he strikes the side of a gate, then he and the turnpike keeper switch places.Conflict games such as "hoop battle" or "tournament" can also be played. For this game boys organize into opposing teams that drive their hoops against each other with the aim of knocking down as many of the opponents' hoops as possible. Only those hoops which fall as a result of a strike by another hoop are counted out. In some parts of England boys played a similar game called "encounters," where two boys would drive their hoops against each other, the one whose hoop was left standing being the winner.
The "hoop hunt" is yet another game, in which one or more hoops are allowed to roll down a hill, with the double aim of rolling as far as possible and then of locating the hoop wherever it may have ended up.
British Empire
In England children are known to have played the game as early as the 15th century. By the late 18th century boys driving hoops in the London streets had become a nuisance, according to Joseph StruttJoseph Strutt (engraver and antiquary)
Joseph Strutt was an English engraver, artist, antiquary and writer.-Childhood:Strutt was born at Springfield Mill in Chelmsford, Essex, the youngest son of Thomas Strutt by his wife Elizabeth - the mill belonged to his father, a wealthy miller...
. Throughout the 1840s a barrage of denunciations appeared in the papers against "The Hoop Nuisance," in which their iron hoops were blamed for inflicting severe injuries to pedestrians' shins The London police attempted to eradicate the practice, confiscating the iron hoops of boys and even of girls trundling them through the streets and parks. That campaign however seems to have failed, as it was accompanied by renewed complaints about the increase of the nuisance.
Other writers mocked the complainers as grumblers depriving the "juvenile community" of a healthy and harmless pastime that had been practiced for hundreds of years "without any apparent inconvenience to the public at large." The passion for passing laws was ridiculed: "Enact, say our modern philosophers, enact. Pass statute after statute. Regulate with exquisite minuteness the cries of the baby in the cradle, the laughter of the hoop-trundling boy, the murmurrings of the toothless old man." In the 1860s the anti-trundling campaign was taken up by Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...
, who blamed the boys for driving iron hoops under horses' legs, with the result that the rider is thrown and very often the horse breaks a leg. Babbage achieved a certain notoriety in this matter, being denounced in debate in Commons in 1864 for "commencing a crusade against the popular game of tip-cat
Tip-cat
Tip-cat is a pastime which consists of tapping a short billet of wood with a larger stick ; the shorter piece is tapered or sharpened on both ends so that it can be "tipped up" into the air when struck by the larger, at which point the player...
and the trundling of hoops."
Colony of Tasmania
The Colony of Tasmania was a British colony that existed on the island of Tasmania from 1856 until 1901, when it federated together with the five other Australian colonies to form the Commonwealth of Australia...
boys trundling hoops were blamed for endangering horsemen and rending ladies' dresses, and the Hobart
Hobart
Hobart is the state capital and most populous city of the Australian island state of Tasmania. Founded in 1804 as a penal colony,Hobart is Australia's second oldest capital city after Sydney. In 2009, the city had a greater area population of approximately 212,019. A resident of Hobart is known as...
paper called for their banishment to the suburbs, bye-laws, and police attention.
Not only schoolboys, but even graduate students at Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
enjoyed trundling hoops after their lectures. The practice, however, was brought to an end sometime before 1816, by means of a statute that forbade Masters of Arts to roll hoops or play marbles.
By the early 19th century the game was already part of the standard physical education of girls, together with jumping rope and dumbbells. Girls from four to fourteen could be seen by the hundreds, trundling their hoops across the grass in the London parks. Though held to be common in the early years of the 19th century, the simplicity and innocence of those years was alleged to have been replaced by the 1850s with a precocious maturity, where "Instead of trundling hoops, urchins smoke cigars."
In the mid-19th century bent ash was favored as material for making wooden hoops. In early 20th c. England girls played with a wooden hoop driven with a wooden stick, while boys' hoops were made of metal and the sticks were key-shaped and also made of metal. In some locations hoops with spokes and bells were available in stores but were disdained by boys.
The New World
A great number of widely separated Native American peoples play or played an ancient target-shooting version of hoop rolling currently known as chunkeyChunkey
Chunkey is a game of Native American origin. It was played by rolling disc shaped stones across the ground and throwing spears at them in an attempt to place the spear as close to the stopped stone as possible...
. Though the forms of the game exhibited great variation, generally certain elements were present, namely a prepared terrain over which a disc or hoop was rolled at high speed, at which implements similar to spears were thrown. The game when played by adults was often associated with gambling and often very valuable prizes, such as horses, exchanged hands. The game has been played by tribes such as the Arapaho
Arapaho
The Arapaho are a tribe of Native Americans historically living on the eastern plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Sioux. Arapaho is an Algonquian language closely related to Gros Ventre, whose people are seen as an early...
, the Omaha
Omaha (tribe)
The Omaha are a federally recognized Native American nation which lives on the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska and western Iowa, United States...
, the Pawnee and many others.
Since hoop and stick involves spear throwing it is thought to predate the introduction of the bow and arrow that took place around 500 CE. In the California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
region in the 18th century it was widespread and known as takersia. Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
Eskimo
Eskimo
Eskimos or Inuit–Yupik peoples are indigenous peoples who have traditionally inhabited the circumpolar region from eastern Siberia , across Alaska , Canada, and Greenland....
players divide into two groups. While the first group rolls the hoops, a large and a small one, the players in the other group attempt to throw spears through the hoops. The Cheyenne
Cheyenne
Cheyenne are a Native American people of the Great Plains, who are of the Algonquian language family. The Cheyenne Nation is composed of two united tribes, the Só'taeo'o and the Tsétsêhéstâhese .The Cheyenne are thought to have branched off other tribes of Algonquian stock inhabiting lands...
named two months of the year after the game: January is known as Ok sey' e shi his, "Hoop-and-stick game moon," and February as Mak ok sey' i shi, "Big hoop-and-stick game moon." Among the Blackfeet
Blackfoot
The Blackfoot Confederacy or Niitsítapi is the collective name of three First Nations in Alberta and one Native American tribe in Montana....
, children would play the game by throwing a feathered stick through the rolling hoop.
Among the European settlers, hoop-rolling was a seasonal sport, seeing the greatest activity in the winter. Children, beside rolling the hoops, also tossed them back and forth, catching them on their sticks. In the 1830s hoop trundling was seen as an activity so characteristic of the young that it was adopted by a fanatic sect in Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
whose members mimicked children's activities in order to gain access to heaven
Heaven
Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings originate, are enthroned or inhabit...
. Hoop driving was also seen as a remedy for the sedentary and overprotected lives led by many American girls of the mid-19th century. The game was popular with both girls and boys: in a 1898 survey of 1000 boys and 1000 girls in Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
, both the girls and the boys named hoop and stick their favorite toy. In Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
, the wood of the American elm (Ulmus americana) was particularly valued for making hoop-poles.
The Wellesley College Hoop Rolling Contest is an annual spring tradition that dates back to 1895, and is only open to graduating seniors on that college's May Day celebration.