Growing our Junior Club Membership

Our Journey – from 2 schools to 10 In December 2012 we met with RM to discuss how we could access primary schools. RM introduced us to SGO SGO contacted schools and we ran a Level 2 School Games event for the first time in March 2013 2 schools attended – we coached them and umpired some matches As a follow up we ran 6 Saturday morning session in early summer 2013 – we had 35 attendees 25 new Junior players joined the club in September 2013 In March 2014 we ran our second Level 2 school games event – 10 schools attended We will be running Saturday morning sessions this summer For the first time ever we were able to enter teams into the Avon U10 and U12 Leagues

How Did We Find Coaches? Members of our Youth Development Team volunteered to attend the Level 2 Games event Our club coach volunteered to run our follow up Saturday morning programme Having coaches who were friendly and empathetic to the needs of young people was crucial

How Did We Find Schools? The SGO contacted all schools on our behalf Information regarding the games were hosted on the CSP website The success of our Year 1 efforts meant that more schools wanted to be involved in Year 2

What Delivery Did We Do? On the day of the tournament all schools received a 45 minute coaching session. We umpired all of the matches We ran free follow up sessions for 6 consecutive Saturdays in early summer. We ensured we integrated our ‘new’ players into the regular club sessions in September.

How Did We Make It Sustainable? We are fortunate to get all pitch time for juniors free of charge. We paid our lead coach £35 per session for our 6 week programme. We now see this as part of our offer and our main way of recruiting players into our Juniors. The costs have been met through club funds – having 25 new members paying subs from September has more than covered the costs.

Our Key Success Factors Partnership between our club the SGO and England Hockey Keen team of volunteers who understand the importance for the club to have tangible links with local schools Free follow up club sessions – vital to making the link sustainable and recruiting players