The "Hockey Stick" in a VW tranny is the shift actuator which is directly attached to the far end of your shifter linkage. When you move your shift lever left-right, the hockey stick rotates, When you pull your shifter front-back the hockey stick moves in and out at the tranny.
The working end of the hockey stick is roughly the size of one's pinky finger. Not a lot of metal there, and it has a 90 degree bend at the end (at the weakest point). It looks like a hockey stick, or maybe your foot, it you're not Canadian, eh?
When it is moved back and forth in a rotational way (when you move the shift lever left to right) the working end slips between two tines of a "fork" coming from the tranny gear set, and the fork is also at 90 degrees to it's attached shaft. There are three of those forks; 1(push in)&2(pull out), 3(in)&4(out) and reverse(out).
I believe that clever Ferdinand Porsche purposely made the hockey stick the weaker link because you can change it with the simple removal/replacement of the tranny nose cone - 15 minutes, once the tranny is out on the floor, and that allows time for a potty break.
If you beef up the hockey stick, you also should be running reinforced (usually with weld) actuators because they are the next to go, but there's not a lot of room to reinforce them. If one of THOSE break, then you'll need a whole tranny tear-down to replace them. LOTS of time and LOTS of money.
So that's why you don't see a lot of people running beefier hockey sticks. All you're doing is moving the next break further inside the tranny.
Yes, you can "power shift" a VW tranny as Dave described - the post 1965 will shift better than the pre-1965 versions (better synchro action on the pre-load) but NONE of them like it much. Remember that the case is Aluminum and has a tendency to try to sideways-shift the gear sets to a position slightly outside of the case when over stressed (as they would be with full power shifts). As stock, they're designed for moderate speed, deliberate and power-off shifts, period. I've had maybe 20 or more VW based cars, and some of them were class-winner autocross racers. Never broke a hockey stick.