Summer Hockey
We decided at the end of last season that instead of having the usual summer break, we'd continue running our weekly sessions and give people a chance to stay fit or come down and try hockey out. Almost 50 people have been to one of more of the Tuesday sessions with 15 of those coming down for the first time. Although we've now moved into pre-season we're still very keen to see new faces so please do get in touch and come and join in!

Summer Camp
We also ran our first ever 2 day summer camp, our coaching team set up camp at Cowley High school and over the 2 days we had 30 children down enjoying their hockey. It's really important to the club that we encourage junior across the town to give hockey a go and working closely with Cowley we've been able to do that. We're hoping to see many of those children that attended come along to our regular in season junior sessions and hopefully for some making the step up to playing for our senior teams when the time comes! It was a really enjoyable couple of days and we can only again repeat our thanks to the parents for bringing the children along and to Cowley for allowing us to use their pitch. Lots more to come on the junior development front!

Investing in our people
We're lucky as a club to have so many people keen to play a part and continue building the club. It's important that as we continue to grow, our club members grow and develop with us - not only playing wise but off the pitch too. We're always looking to offer opportunities to those who are keen to develop and over the summer the club put on a England Hockey led Junior coaching course which was attended by 11 of our players. We've also paid for players to complete umpiring courses and are currently putting more people through appropriate Safeguarding training. Lots of the skills learnt on these courses can help away from hockey too and if anybody is keen to take up coaching, umpiring etc then the club will back them all the way.

A new committee
As with every summer the club held it's AGM and a new committee was appointed, there have been some key changes for this coming year and we'll go into detail on those in the next few days. One of the biggest things from the meeting though was the appointing of our first ladies captain - again, we'll shed more light on that in the near future! Thank you to those who have come forward and taken up positions.

A new home
We've been working with England Hockey over the last couple of years as we look to ensure that the club has a long term place to call home. Since we started out we've trained and played at different locations across town and that's never really been ideal. Rainford High and Newton Leisure have been great to us as a club but unfortunately neither could offer a guaranteed long term place to train and play. A position became available at Sutton Leisure and with additional work and guarantees from England Hockey in place we now know we'll be playing and training regularly at the same place for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately hockey is affected up and down the country by a lack of playing pitches as more and more all weather pitches being replaced by 3G which is unsuitable for hockey. We're safe from this at Sutton and that really allows us to focus on building the club.

And Finally....
Everybody should by now know that one of our key focus areas has been developing our ladies section. The last 12 months has seen us make great progress and the numbers down to training is demonstrating this. As mentioned above we've now got a ladies captain, a ladies kit all ordered and a set of fixtures for the upcoming season! It's a really important step forward for us as a club, we've said for the last couple of years that a Ladies and Junior section is vital for our long term future and both are really coming on well. We've also got ourselves a new ladies kit sponsor and that's something that again we'll provide more detail on as we run up to the start of the league season.

So there you have it, the summer has been pretty much non-stop as we continue to build this club up, we're grateful to have so many people now involved and really helping us take the next steps - but we'll always want to see more down! If ladies and junior development has been our focus over the past 18 months, the next 18 months will definitely be about ensuring more and more people in St Helens are aware of the sport and given the opportunity to take part and get involved!

Look out for more information in the coming weeks as we build up towards the 2022/23 league season.