Green roots: The teams worldwide named after St Patrick

The Irish have made a huge contribution to sports around the world and often, as a means of expressing themselves on the sports field, teams were given an Irish identity.

As we celebrate St Patrick's Day let’s explore some of the teams in different sports that have been named after him.

Unfortunately for St Patrick, he is not the most popular choice for Irish named teams around the world. Teams called the Shamrocks are easily the most common, Celtic(s) or Hibernians are quite popular too, with Fighting Irish being used by numerous teams, mainly in the United States.

Often when a team is called St Patrick’s, it is because of the involvement of a church or school named after him and there are certainly plenty of those. There are even a few communities such as St Patrick, Minnesota and San Patricio in Texas.

In some other cases, the owners named the team after St Patrick in the hope of appealing to the local Irish community, while there are several GAA teams named after St Patrick, particularly in the United States, yet here we focus on other sports.

Toronto St Patricks (Ice Hockey, Canada)

Once nicknamed the Belfast of Canada due to the violence between Catholic Irish and Protestant Irish, it was inevitable that the Irish in Toronto would become involved in ice hockey.

From the early 1900s, St Patrick’s were an amateur hockey team operating in the city. The professional Toronto St Patrick’s were formed in 1919 two years after the creation of the NHL.

Before them in 1915 were the short-lived Toronto Shamrocks who failed to capture the public audience and before the Toronto Shamrocks and over in Quebec were the Montreal Shamrocks who won the Stanley Cup in 1899 and 1900 thanks to innovative players such as Harry Trihey and Art