Sport In Profile UK Promo | Page 38

woking hockey club FOLLOW US ONLINE twitter.com/sportinprofile Atmosphere “Woking Hockey Club is in an optimistic mood. We are lucky enough to have our own clubhouse with two pitches right outside and are in a health position financially. We are in the process of working towards building an extension as well as renovating the whole existing clubhouse which will include a new kitchen, larger Committee room, interactive coaching equipment, new furniture and most importantly more storage. We currently have one sand filled pitch which is only 3 years old and a much older sand filled pitch which is nicknamed ‘The Beach’! We are intending to replace the carpet on this pitch and have two quality pitches at the same time which will greatly relieve the stress when allocating pitches to fixtures as it is a tricky balance to ensure every team has enough time on our premier pitch. I believe we have one of the best hockey teas around and this is down to our long association with our Saturday Caterers, Ecchers Ltd., With up to 10 home games to have volunteers catering was a big ask, Bob and Steve have been with us for 7 years and are definitely part of the club.” Youth “Youth development is very important to the club; we have produced some great players who are within the England at age group level set up – they have moved to continue developing their game with Surbiton as we couldn’t compete with the playing standard or International players there. At Woking, we are trying to develop every player, regardless of their ability. We have over 350 juniors from 5-16yrs so that can be tricky but we have some passionate volunteers who are doing a great job. As the Junior section is so big now, we took the step to engage a Director of Coaching for Junior Hockey and although this role is still evolving we will get the balance right with our coaching levels and programme. Over the last few years we have developed a ‘Youth to Adult’ policy which was written to ensuring the smooth flow in to adult hockey. For some it is easy but others take more time and we wanted to provide a safe and fun experience of adult hockey. We would like every one of our juniors to become adult members and continue to play hockey throughout their lives. We do have lots of juniors in our adult section already starting from thirteen years old and they span all our teams, to begin with we try and keep some juniors t ogether so that they have a familiar face.” Community “As part of our commitment to previous funding we have to put money aside each year in to a sinking fund to assist with replacing the pitch carpets and to do this we hire out our pitches. Every night from around 6pm both of our pitches are full with football and hockey; hockey training is every night and we have around 30 football groups 38 www.sportip.biz 38