The PHL forms a key part of the South African Hockey Association’s (SAHA) high performance pipeline which is aimed at better equipping our national men’s and women’s teams for international competition.

Thanks to support from the Department of Sport & Recreation, the annual event will consist of both a men’s and women’s competition and will run over four weekend’s.

The annual event consists of six men’s teams and six women’s teams, respectively, playing in two gender based competitions. These teams are all franchise teams that are 100% owned by SAHA. The team identities have been inspired by famous tourist areas in South Africa and are representative of all nine Provinces.

The team names are as follows:

• Men: Addo Elephants, Drakensburg Dragons, Garden Route Gazelles, Golden Gate Gladiators, Mapungubwe Mambas and the Maropeng Cavemen.
• Women: Blyde River Bunters, Madikwe Rangers, Namaqualand Daisies, Orange River Rafters, St Lucia Lakers and the Wineland Wings.

Owing to the success of the 2016 and 2017 experiment, we will see two of the twelve participating teams permanently dedicated to the SA U21 Men’s and SA U21 Women’s National teams, respectively. This is to prepare our national age group teams for future international tournaments. The SA U21 Men’s team will play as the the Golden Gate Gladiators and the SA U21 Women’s team will play as the Namaqualand Daisies.

Previous Champions: 

2016- Maropeng Cavemen (Men)

            Blyde River Bunters (Women)

2017- Crossroads Maropeng Cavemen (Men)

            Orange River Rafters (Women) 

All matches for PHL will be played at the Randburg Astro in Johannesburg – on a Saturday and Sunday. The event consists of a league stage and a play-off stage:

Each team will play each other once in the league stage. This means each team will play 5 games. The teams who finish 5^th and 6^th respectively in the log, at the end of the league stage, will be knocked out of the competition. The top four teams in the log will progress to the semi-finals. The losing semi-finalists will play-off for 3^rd and 4^th respectively and the winning semi-finalists will progress to the finals of the men’s and women’s competitions.