Your question is a good one and it is a hot topic of discussion in our national and international ice hockey injury meetings. Unfortunately, a lot of the feelings about the use of a face mask are based on anecdotal information, rather than the true facts.

The use of a face mask was mandated in North America in youth hockey leagues in the 1970's. The NCAA instituted the use of the face mask in the late 1970's. Whether it is a cage or a plexiglass shield, the end outcome of protecting the eyes and face have proven to be the same.

In all studies to date, the face mask has proven to provide excellent levels of protection against eye injury, facial lacerations, oral injuries, and other related injuries such as jaw fractures. One of our studies was the first prospective study published in the literature to demonstrate that the use of the face mask did not increase injuries to other parts of the body and other authors have collaborated our findings to supplement our study. The biggest, and probably most important finding, is that to our knowledge, there has never been a case of blindness attributed to a hockey player wearing a face mask correctly. Prior to the use of face masks, there were dozens of cases of blindness due to pucks, skates, or sticks injuring the eye in North America every year. For that reason alone, I would encourage you to wear a full face mask.

The use of the half shield visor has been advocated by some as a means to attempt to protect the eye in those players who refuse to wear a full face mask. While the use of the visor has been shown to decrease the incidence of blindness in studies, the potential is still there for a stick to get up and under the visor and injure the eye. In addition, it does not protect against the majority of facial lacerations which we have found to occur around the chin and mouth. Our studies have demonstrated that the use of face masks do not increase the risk of injury. There has been some discussion among those who have not seen the data to support this that the use of the face mask has caused players to skate with reckless abandon and to let their sticks rise up more often. We feel that this information is wrong and that this perception is due to the fact that players are bigger, stronger, faster, and wear better overall equipment than those of us who played two to three decades previously.

We would encourage everyone, at all levels of ice hockey, to wear a full coverage face mask to decrease their chances of blindness and to protect their face against injury. Choosing to play without a face mask significantly increases your risk for injury and we highly discourage this.