The National Hockey League (NHL) is a professional ice hockey league composed of 30 teams in North America. It is considered to be the premier professional ice hockey league in the world, and one of the North American major professional sports leagues. The Stanley Cup, the oldest professional sports trophy in North America, is awarded annually to the league champion at the end of each season.
The league was formed in 1917 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada from a predecessor organization, the National Hockey Association (NHA), founded in 1909. It started with four teams, and through a series of expansions, contractions and relocations, the league is now composed of 30 teams, 24 of which are based in the United States and six in Canada. After a labour dispute that led to the cancellation of the entire 2004–05 season, the league has staged a successful comeback, including revenue and profit growth.
The NHL draws many highly skilled players from all over the world. Currently, the league has players from about 20 different countries. Canadians have historically constituted a large majority of the players in the NHL because both the sport and the league originated in Canada. In the past 25 years, the percentages of American and European players have increased because of the NHL's continued expansion into the United States, its high standard of play compared to other leagues, and the availability of highly skilled European players.
Cheerleading
Cheerleading, considered by its proponents as a sport that requires physical fitness, flexibility, coordination and teamwork, uses organized routines made from elements of tumbling, dance, jumps and stunting to direct spectators of events to cheer on sports teams at games and matches and/or compete at cheerleading competitions. The athlete involved is called a cheerleader. With an estimated 1.5 million participants in allstar cheerleading (not including the millions more in high school, college or little league participants) in the United States alone, cheerleading is, according to Newsweek's Arian Campo-Flores, "the most quintessential of American sports." The growing presentation of the sport to a global audience has been led by the 1997 start of broadcasts of cheerleading competition by ESPN International and the worldwide release of the 2000 film Bring it On. Due in part to this recent exposure, there are now an estimated 100,000 participants scattered around the rest of the world in countries including Australia, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
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