Background

The Harewood Hockey Club was established 92 years ago and after many years without a permanent ‘home’, settled in Nunweek Park in the early 1980s. The club’s home grounds were the grass pitches of the newly developed Nunweek Park. Soon after, the clubrooms were constructed where the car park is now located but the building was shifted to its current site when the artificial turf was constructed in 1989. This turf, the second one in Christchurch, was developed by the Harewood and High School Old Boys clubs, working together on the project. It is now owned and managed by a Trust, the Canterbury Artificial Surfaces Trust (CAST).

The club currently has a membership of over 600 playing members, spread across a wide range of competitions; Fun Sticks (for young children), through all the primary school ages, Platinum competition (for secondary school ages), Sunday League, Mid-Week and Masters teams in senior competitions through to the Canterbury Premier League. So the Harewood Club is the largest hockey club in Canterbury, catering for a diverse range of genders, ages and ethnicities.

Despite this pre-eminence in Canterbury hockey, the club has not been very good at keeping in touch with its large number of past members and supporters. Recent efforts have been made on the male side of the club to rectify this with some success, but much more needs to be done. The hard working club committee is naturally focussed on administering for the current players so they are able to play regularly each season and thus they have little resource to devote to maintaining these important historical connections. This cohort of past players, provide a huge potential resource for the Club and need to be located and communicated with.

Hockey today is an expensive sport to play. Club subscriptions have been increasing at an alarming rate to meet the various costs that the club faces; Canterbury and New Zealand Hockey Affiliation fees, safety equipment, playing kits costs, turf fees for practice and matches, hockey balls and club room maintenance, insurance etc etc. In addition, if a player also plays for a school team and/or gets into representative teams and goes to tournaments, the costs escalate dramatically.

An unfortunate consequence of this situation is that some young people cannot afford to play hockey or cannot commit to any representative play or perhaps cannot play for both club and school. This latter situation is possible these days and enables a young player to retain their club membership benefits during and post schooling, whilst gaining the benefits that the school sport can contribute to their game

Proposal

As mentioned above, over the last 2 years, there has been an initiative to set up a Harewood Hockey Supporters Club but it has only really involved the male side of the Club. This has been led by Glenn Hayde and about 30 people have signed up.

The limited funds raised have been used to support Harewood Premier players with the costs they incur when selected for Canterbury and NZ teams.

The success of this limited project has encouraged Selwyn Maister QSM (Harewood club patron) to campaign for a larger effort involving the whole club. The club committee is totally supporting this initiative and will assist where they can. The Harewood Hockey Supporters Club should really encompass the whole Club membership, friends and whānau, with some clear objectives set out for members.

Such objectives could include some of the following;

• facilitating meeting of supporters through the running of some events

• raising funds through a membership fee and/or fund raising activities

• supporting players who are struggling financially to play hockey, for example having a hardship fund, a representative player fund, etc

• providing vocal support for Harewood teams playing key games

• improving the social environment in the club utilising the club rooms

• work with the club committee to enhance the club membership experience

• identifying corporate partnership candidates

• bequests

To make this a successful venture, we need people to volunteer to assist with some of the following;

• ideas for setting up the Supporters Club

• communications

• establishing a database

• organising fundraising

• promoting the Supporters Club and recruiting, acting as a link to teams/groups within the Harewood Club.

Hockey is a wonderful sport which provides; physical activity, develops hand eye coordination, develops balance and agility, provides competitions at all levels, promotes teamwork skills and provides great social opportunities, across all family members from young children through to the mature years.

It is an international sport, played widely across all continents and currently in both the Olympic and Commonwealth Games as well as having pivotal World Cup events for both male and female players. As such, it provides wonderful opportunities for young people to travel, meet people and play all over the World.

However, it is an expensive sport to play compared to some other major sports and it is largely user pays. Through this initiative, it is hoped that more young players will be able to take up the game and develop the skills and human qualities that many of us have benefitted from over the years, when it wasn’t so expensive to play the game.

Selwyn Maister QSM

Harewood Club Patron

If you’d like to assist with this proposal in any way, please contact one of the following

Kim Grafton - harewoodhelp@gmail.com

Glenn Hayde - smartztoday@gmail.com

Ian Riach - Ian@coffeeworx.co.nz

Selwyn Maister - Maister@xtra.co.nz