Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th june, Rome hosted the international meeting "The future of rink hockey", two debating days about one of the FIRS's pioneer disciplines.

FIRS organised the meeting in collaboration with the "Scuola dello sport" of the Italian Olimpic Committee at the "Giulio Onesti" CONI centre in Rome.

Sunday, more than 100 coaches from all over the world talked about technical issues with the directors of the most representative national federation: Gianni Massari (Italy), Carlos Feriche and Joaquim Pauls (Spain), Luis Senica (Portugal) and Miguel Gomez (Argentina).
Sunday, executives and coaches focused on the future of rink hockey, starting a discussions and analysis that will probably lead to a future change in the rules of the game.

The CONI General Secretary Roberto Fabbricini and the director of the "Scuola dello Sport" Rossana Ciuffetti, opened the meeting together with Sabatino Aracu (president of the Italian federation) and Harro Strucksberg (chairman of the Rink Hockey International Committee).

Sabatino Aracu focused his intervention on two proposals: allow the use of the inline skate in rink hockey and increase the dimensions of the goal cage.
"In the last 25 years, rink hockey has withdrawed because we did not listen to Juan Antonio Samaranch -Aracu said- After having brought the Rink Hockey to the Olimpic games in Barcelona, he suggested to implement the inline skate, but we didn't. In that way, we lost the connection with speed skating, where many of our players came from. Now, it's time to recover that connection. We don't need to revoluzionize the rink hockey, throwing away the "latin fantasy" that is its main feature. Quad and inline skates can exist together and the most performant will preveal. The inline skate ensures much more possibilities to develop rink hockey in new countries than quad skate. For example, the organizers of Nanjing WRG asked to remove rink hockey because they think it can't be developped in Chine due to the use of the quad skate".
About the dimensions of the goal cage, Aracu said: "It not acceptable that only a 20% of the penalties are scored, It not enjoable for the audience. Ice hockey, that is faster than rink hockey, plays with wider cages. It's something to think about.

Aftera Sabatino Aracu, many other persons took the floor giving ideas for the future of rink hockey: international executives such as Harro Strucksberg (CIRH chairman), Fernando Graça (CERH president), Moacyr Junior (President of the south american confederation) and Roberto Marotta (FIRS general secretary); presidents or executives of national federation such as Carmelo Paniagua (Spain), Pedro Chypyta (Angola), Keith Allen (England), Joaquim Coimbra (South Africa), Jean-Baptiste Piemontesi (Switzerland), Claudio Maeso (Uruguay) and Ricardo Suarez (Colombia); coaches such as Pino Marzella (Italy) and Luis Senica (Portugal) and Alberto Ambrogi (journalist of RAI and former CERH press officer).

In the next month, FIRS will create a dedicated commission that will evaluate all the proposals for new rules. The goal is to reach a final decision before the end of 2016 and apply the new rules starting from January 2017.

All the speaches of the international meeting ara available on this FIRS TV channel.