An Even Earlier Stick

In the last post we had a quick look at the evolution of the early hockey stick, and the effect it may have had on scoring in the game. Today I give you a little bonus. I found a high-quality image of a stick from c.1880, five years earlier than the oldest one poorly illustrated in the last post. The 1880 stick is illustrated below, along with the 1885 and 1893 editions of the implement.

It looks like the first big change was in fact the shape of the blade, which went from a rounded shape (much like an early field hockey stick blade but with more surface area) to something more oblong in the early 1880s, which greatly resembles a modern blade.