Bike polo is a game where players ride bicycles on a street hockey court, using hockey nets and a street hockey ball. Players carry mallets, usually homemade out of a golf club shaft or ski pole affixed to a solid plastic cylinder closed on one end and open on the other.
I don’t know much about polo, but bike polo plays a lot like street hockey. The goal is to put the ball in the net using the mallet, and without putting your feet down. It’s a fun game.
But, in my opinion, it’s a flawed game. As players’ skill and familiarity with the game increases, it quickly becomes tedious. At first, it’s fast, freewheeling chaos. But as people become accustomed to shooting, and acccuracy improves, one player on each team needs to stay in net constantly to prevent a shot from anywhere on the court from sailing into an open net. And playing goalie on a bike sucks.
I’m not a fan of playing goalie in any game because you’re left out of the majority of the game, but it’s even worse in bike polo. Even when the action does come to your end of the court, there’s not a ton you can do to affect whether or not the ball goes in – you’re effectively just a static obstacle to decrease the size of the net.
Plus it’s strenuous to stay up on the bike without moving, arguably more strenuous than chasing the ball, so it’s not like goalies work as subs, they just sit there and get tired and do very little. It sucks.
This combination favors dedicated goalies with absurd bikes specialized to presenting a larger surface, blocking more of the net.
There are a few ways to fix this. The most obvious is just to play with smaller nets, or nets with built in obstructions (which already exist for hockey training).
But I prefer a different solution: move the nets a bit further from the back wall, and turn them around:
This solves the problem of a shot from across the court sailing into the net (and even ricochets would be hard, as the balls are not very bouncy), so it doesn’t make sense to leave a goalie in the net. But since the net is large, it allows well-placed shots from the corner, so protecting the goal still makes sense, but as a dynamic and temporary part of play, which is how it functions among new players.
Because players need to turn the corner to score, this setup also encourages tight stick-handling battles, which are a ton of fun and some of the most interesting to watch. At the same time, it encourages passing plays, zone coverage, and general strategic elements to give the game more depth at higher levels of play.
I used to have a group that played regularly, but the rink where we played stopped allowing it, and around the same time I ran short of time to keep it up. So I’ve never had the chance to talk a group of reasonably good players into trying this change, and probably never will. So I’m releasing the idea into the ether. If you try it, let me know how it goes.
