How to Grow a Hockey Club

1. Find where the hockey players are

Hockey has a recruitment quirk that works in your favour: an enormous number of people played at school, college or university and simply stopped when they moved town, started a job or had kids. They already know the rules, own the muscle memory and miss it more than they admit. Your job is mostly to be findable and to make coming back feel easy.

• School and university leavers. The single biggest pool. People who played to a decent standard and lost their club when they graduated or relocated. A clear "adult hockey, all standards, returners very welcome, sticks provided" post in a local group flushes them out fast.
• England Hockey's club finder. Affiliating gets your club listed on the national finder, which catches everyone searching "hockey club near me" and players moving into your area looking for a side.
• Back to Hockey. England Hockey runs a "Back to Hockey" programme for returning and beginner adults. Branding a beginner-friendly block under that banner gives you a recognised, low-pressure hook that does a lot of the reassuring for you.
• Cross-over sports. Netball players bring footwork and spatial awareness, footballers bring fitness and reading of the game, cricketers bring hand-eye co-ordination. A flyer or a word at a local netball or cricket club is a warm audience.
• Your venue and local schools. The astro you hire usually has its own enquiry list — ask them to point hockey enquiries at you. A friendly link with a school or junior section feeds your senior squad for years and is the most durable growth channel there is.

2. Make joining a five-second job

You've done the hard part — someone is interested. Now do not lose them to friction. The classic hockey-club own goal is making a keen returner email a generic club address, wait three days for a committee member to reply, and then turn up to a Wednesday session unsure whether they're expected or whether there's a stick for them.

Optimise ruthlessly for the path from "interested" to "on the squad list". One link or QR code should sign them up, show the next training session, and let them pay a match fee or sub if they want to commit there and then. In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club): they scan it, enter their name, and they're on the roster and visible to the captain — no email chain, no paper form on the touchline, no spreadsheet for you to update later.

Put that QR code everywhere a hockey player might be standing: pitch-side at taster sessions, on the clubhouse noticeboard, at the bottom of every social post, and on a card you can hand a curious parent at a junior game.

3. Nail the newcomer experience

The first session decides whether someone becomes a fixture or a no-show. Hockey can feel intimidating to a beginner — there's specialist kit, a hard ball, and an unfamiliar three-card discipline system — so the welcome has to do real work.

• Have a stick ready. Hand a loan stick to anyone who turns up without one. Asking a newcomer to buy a £40 stick before their first touch is the surest way to never see them again.
• Pair them with a buddy. Assign a friendly regular to shadow them, explain where to stand and quietly cover the etiquette. Nobody should spend their first session lost on the far wing wondering what's happening.
• Brief three rules, not thirty. Goals only count inside the D, only the flat face of the stick, and no feet. That's enough to play. Don't open the rulebook on someone's first night.
• Get them touches. Run small-sided 7-a-side games rather than a full eleven-a-side where a beginner can go ten minutes without the ball. More touches means more fun means they come back.
• Follow up. A quick message after — "great to have you, same time next week?" — converts a one-off triallist into a regular more reliably than anything else you can do.

4. Keep them with one channel and a published schedule

For a team sport, retention is not a nice-to-have — lose four regulars and you can't put a side out. The two cheapest, highest-impact retention tools are dull and unglamorous: one place to talk, and a calendar people can plan around.

One communication channel

If availability is in a WhatsApp group, the lineup is in the captain's head, fixture changes arrive by league email and the socials live in a different chat, people miss things — and in hockey a missed message means a short-handed team and a thrashing. Put everything in one place. ClubLono gives every club a members-only chat that the whole squad is automatically in, plus a per-fixture thread so a "pitch frozen, game's off" reaches exactly the people playing this Saturday, not all eighty members.

A published fixture calendar

"Training Wednesday, game Saturday" is the floor. What keeps regulars regular is a published calendar showing the next couple of months — training, home and away fixtures, cup dates, and the weekends you're away so nobody turns up to an empty pitch. ClubLono publishes a recurring session and fixture calendar with squad capacity, collects availability in the same place, and pushes a notification when a new fixture opens. The less guesswork there is in a player's week, the more weeks they show up.

5. Build an identity people want to belong to

Ask any long-serving hockey player why they've stayed at their club for fifteen years and almost none of them will say "the standard of the hockey". They'll say the people, the teas, the tour, the end-of-season dinner. The on-pitch result is a small part of why adults keep playing a Saturday sport; belonging is most of it.

So build the club, not just the team. Run the post-match teas and a proper social calendar. Give the teams names and a bit of friendly internal rivalry. Get a club shirt people actually want to wear around town — a recognisable kit is free advertising every time someone wears it to the supermarket. Take photos at games and socials (with consent) and share them in the club chat, because seeing themselves as part of something is what makes a player invite a mate. The clubs that grow fastest are the ones whose members do the recruiting for them, and members only do that for a club they're proud of.

6. Add competition once you have regulars

Once you've got a dependable core turning up, a competitive structure turns "a thing I sometimes do" into "my club". Don't lead with it — a league commitment scares off beginners — but layer it on top of the social training once the numbers are solid.

Start small. An internal ladder or a series of small-sided 7-a-side tournaments on training nights gives people something to compete for without the pressure of a Saturday league. When you're ready to step up, enter a side into your regional league through England Hockey affiliation — that's the moment a casual group becomes a real club with a season, a table and something to play for. The classic progression is: training and friendlies, then an internal ladder, then a 2nd XI alongside the 1st, then a junior section feeding both.

ClubLono runs internal tournaments on its recommended pool-into-playoff format (guaranteed game time, a clean route to a winner) for free, and full season leagues — divisions, home-and-away fixtures and automatic standings — as a Premium feature for when you've graduated to a proper season.

7. Fund growth with fees and membership

Growth costs money — more pitch time for a second side, more loan sticks for taster sessions, GK kit, affiliation and league entry. The trick is to let the club's own subs and match fees fund the next intake, rather than the founder quietly bankrolling it until they resent it.

Collect money automatically so none of it leaks. Chasing match fees on a cold touchline is where income evaporates, and a club that runs at a quiet loss eventually folds. Set a season sub for your committed players and a per-game guest rate for triallists, take it digitally, and reinvest the surplus straight back into the kit and pitch time that bring the next wave of players in.

ClubLono is free for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — squad list, availability, fixtures, chat, capacity and refunds all work on the free tier. On paid sessions the host receives the payment less Stripe's 1.5% + 20p and a 5% ClubLono platform fee. The Premium tier (£19.99/month or £199.99/year, with a 14-day free trial on either) drops that platform fee to 1% and unlocks multi-club hosting, leagues, kiosk mode, cross-club stats and DUPR export. ClubLono never holds members' funds — money goes straight to the host's bank account via Stripe, and cancelled paid sessions auto-refund every booked player. There is no per-player fee. For a growing club running multiple teams and a season of league fixtures, Premium's 1% fee and league tooling pay for themselves quickly — and until then, everything you need to grow is free.