How to Run a Hockey Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Hockey is one of the more demanding sports to run a club around. It's eleven a side, it needs a specific surface, the kit list is long, and a fixture only happens if twenty-two-odd people turn up at the same place at the same time. Get the foundations wrong and you spend every week firefighting; get them right and the club mostly runs itself.

Pitch and venue

Modern field hockey is played almost entirely on a water-based or sand-dressed artificial turf (astro) pitch, roughly 91.4m by 55m, with a goal at each end and the distinctive 16-yard hitting circle (the "D") in front of each. You will not find this in your average leisure centre — astro pitches live at sports clubs, schools, universities and the better council facilities, and they are in high demand. Lock a recurring slot before you do anything else. A fixed "training Wednesday 8–9.30pm, home games Saturday afternoon" does more for retention than any recruitment drive, because hockey players plan their week around a club, not the other way round.

Negotiate a block booking across the season and ask whether floodlights are included (winter training is in the dark from October), whether goals and corner flags are stored on-site, and whether there's a clubhouse or changing space. Carting full-size goals around is not an option, so on-site storage is close to non-negotiable.

Equipment

Each player brings their own stick, shin pads, gum shield and astro trainers, but the club should hold: a set of match balls and training balls, bibs in two colours for splitting training into teams, cones, two sets of goalkeeping kit (helmet, kickers, leg guards, hand protectors — GK kit is expensive and most newcomers won't own it), a first aid kit and ideally a defibrillator location you know. A stash of loan sticks for taster sessions is the single best growth investment you can make: nobody buys a £40 stick to find out whether they like hockey.

Format

Decide whether you're running open training (turn up, drills, small-sided games — social, low commitment) or structured fixtures (a registered team in a local league with a fixed Saturday calendar). Most clubs do both: midweek training is the welcoming front door and the engine room, and the weekend league fixture is the thing people commit to. If you're brand new, start with training and friendlies, build a reliable squad of fifteen-plus, then enter a league the following season.

2. Build a squad that turns up

A racket club can survive with a trickle of casual drop-ins. A hockey team cannot — you need a dependable core large enough to put a full side out every week, including the weeks half of them are away. Recruitment is therefore the founding job, and it never quite stops.

Where to recruit

• Local and university leavers — the biggest single pool is people who played at school or university and stopped when they moved towns. They already know the game; they just need a club near them. A post in a town Facebook group saying "adult hockey, all levels, sticks provided, first session free" finds them fast.
• England Hockey's club finder — affiliating gets your club listed on the national finder, which catches people searching "hockey club near me" and players relocating into your area.
• Back-to-hockey sessions — England Hockey runs a "Back to Hockey" programme aimed at returning and beginner adults. Branding a beginner-friendly block under it gives you a ready-made, recognised hook.
• Cross-over sports and local schools — netball, football and cricket players cross over well, and a friendly link with a local school or junior section feeds your senior squad for years.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose an interested returner is to make them email a club address, wait three days for a reply, and turn up not knowing whether they're expected. The fastest way to convert them is a single link or QR code that adds them to the squad list, shows the next training session and lets them pay match fees or subs when they're ready. In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club): players scan it, enter their name, and they're on the roster — no email chain, no spreadsheet for you to keep updating, and no "sorry, who are you?" on the touchline.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

Hockey is more expensive to run than most sports — astro hire is dear, umpires often need paying, and there's affiliation and league entry on top — so getting the money right matters more here than almost anywhere. There are three models worth considering, and most clubs mix them.

Match fees (pay-per-session)

Players pay each time they play or train — typically £4–£7 for training and £5–£10 for a match to cover pitch, umpires and balls. Pros: fair on irregular attendees and easy for newcomers trying the sport. Cons: jagged cash flow, and collecting cash on a cold touchline while also trying to umpire and captain is the most thankless job in the club.

Annual or monthly membership (subs)

An annual or termly sub covering the season, sometimes with a smaller match fee on top. Pros: predictable income you can budget pitch hire against, and far less per-game admin. Cons: a big up-front number puts off triallists, and it doesn't suit students or shift workers who play sporadically.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A season sub for committed regulars plus a per-game guest rate for casuals and triallists. This is how most established hockey clubs run, because it lets the dependable core fund the pitch while keeping a low-friction door open for the returners you're trying to recruit. The only complication is tracking who's paid which, which is exactly where software earns its keep.

What to charge

Work backwards from your real costs: astro hire per slot, umpire fees, balls, and a slice of the annual affiliation and league entry. Divide the per-fixture cost by a realistic turnout (not your aspirational one), add a little for incidentals, and round to a number people can pay in one tap. Charging £7 instead of £6.75 saves you twenty minutes of awkward maths every week, and nobody has ever quit a hockey club over twenty-five pence.

4. Run a fixture that feels fair

In a rotation sport the fairness battle is about the queue. In hockey it's about game time and selection — who starts, who's stuck on the bench, and whether the same eleven play every minute while the rest freeze on the sideline. Get this wrong and your squad-builders drift away; get it right and people forgive a heavy defeat.

Selecting the squad

Each match needs a starting XI plus a bench, and hockey allows rolling substitutions, so unlike football you can rotate players on and off freely through the game. Use that. Publish availability early in the week, pick on who's actually free, and tell people their position before they arrive — a winger who learns at 1.55pm that they're playing in defence is an unhappy winger. ClubLono lets you take availability, pick a starting XI against a formation (3-3-3-1, 4-3-3, 4-4-2 and the rest are built in), and post the lineup so everyone knows the plan before the warm-up.

Positions and formation

A hockey side runs goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders and forwards, and the modern shape is usually written as a back-to-front string like 3-3-3-1 (three at the back, a midfield band, three up, a lone striker) or a flatter 4-3-3. You don't need to over-engineer it for social hockey — a clear shape and everyone knowing their slot beats a clever system nobody understands.

Scoring and the clock

Hockey is a timed sport: the result is whoever has scored more goals when the clock runs out, not a race to a target. League matches are typically four 15-minute quarters (60 minutes of play) or two 35-minute halves; for friendlies and social games, set a sensible duration up front and stick to it. ClubLono records hockey on the timed scoring mode with a default match length you can change per game, so the app tracks the clock and the score and you log goals as they go in — no scrap of paper that blows away at the far post.

Tournaments and festivals

When you run your own internal tournament or a multi-team festival day, the sensible shape is a pool stage into a playoff: split the teams into pools, everyone plays a guaranteed run of group games, and the top finishers progress to semis and a final. It's ClubLono's recommended format for hockey because it guarantees everyone plenty of game time while still producing a real winner — far better than a straight knockout where half the field is done after one match.

Umpires

Most league matches need two umpires, and arranging them is a job in itself. Build a small pool — encourage a couple of players to take the basic umpiring qualification — and put umpiring duty in the same schedule everyone already checks, so it isn't a frantic Friday-night group message every week.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, and in a sport that lives or dies on numbers it's also existential — lose four regulars and you can't field a side.

Communicate in one place

If availability lives in a WhatsApp group, the lineup in a captain's head, fixture changes in a league email and the social plans in a separate chat, people miss things — and a missed message in hockey means a short-handed team. Pick one channel for everything. ClubLono includes a members-only club chat with photos and reactions — every player on the squad list is automatically in it — and booked players get a thread for their specific fixture, so a last-minute "pitch frozen, game off" reaches exactly the people playing, not all eighty members at once.

Publish the fixture calendar

"Training Wednesday, game Saturday" is the floor. Better is a published calendar showing the next two months of training, home and away fixtures and the cup dates — including the weekends you're away so nobody turns up to an empty pitch. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring session and fixture calendar with squad capacity, and players get a push notification when a new fixture opens, with availability collected in the same place.

Make it social

Hockey clubs retain best when there's a clubhouse culture around the sport — the post-match teas, the end-of-season dinner, the tour. The on-pitch result matters far less to most adults than belonging to something. Run the socials, take photos (with consent), and the squad numbers look after themselves. Software shouldn't get in the way of that; it should just make the logistics invisible.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section — most of it is well covered if you affiliate to your national governing body.

Insurance and affiliation

Public liability insurance is essential for any club running sessions on a hired pitch, and most venues require it as a condition of booking. In hockey the standard route is to affiliate to your national governing body — England Hockey (or Scottish Hockey, Hockey Wales or Ulster Hockey), with Great Britain Hockey sitting above them at international level — which is also how you enter the league pyramid and usually bundles a public-liability and personal-accident policy. Read what's actually covered, because affiliation cover is a floor rather than full protection, and check whether your league mandates affiliation for every registered player.

Safeguarding

If you run junior sessions or a youth section you need a welfare officer, DBS-checked coaches and a written safeguarding policy. Use England Hockey's templates and the Template Welfare Officer guidance rather than writing one from scratch — and remember junior hockey shares pitches and changing rooms with adults, which the policy must address.

Data protection (UK GDPR)

The moment you store members' names, emails, phone numbers or emergency contacts you're a data controller. In practice: keep a short, plain-English privacy notice, don't share personal data without consent, store medical and emergency details only as long as you need them, and let members delete their account on request. With ClubLono the data-protection plumbing is handled at the platform level and members can delete their own account from in-app settings.

Money handling

Hockey clubs turn over real money once you add up pitch hire, umpires and affiliation, so open a separate bank account for the club from day one. Mixing club subs with your personal current account is the fastest route to a difficult AGM two seasons from now.

7. Grow without burning out

Most volunteer-run hockey clubs don't collapse from a lack of members — they collapse because the one person who books the pitch, picks the team, chases the subs, arranges the umpires and runs the WhatsApp finally gets tired and walks. The founder's real job is to stop being the single point of failure.

• Spread the load. Hockey naturally splits into roles — fixtures secretary, treasurer, umpire co-ordinator, social secretary, a captain per team. Hand each one out and train a deputy who can pick a side and unlock the pitch when you're away.
• Automate the boring stuff. Subs collection, match-fee chasing, availability, the lineup, refunds when a fixture's called off — all of it can be a tool's job. If it lives only in your head, the club misses a fixture the first weekend you're away.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — pitch contact and access codes, league portal logins, payment login, where the goals and GK kit are stored, umpire contacts — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable mid-season.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small hockey club on a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a tin of cash on the touchline. Plenty do. It works at one team, creaks at two, and becomes a part-time unpaid job the moment you add a midweek side and a junior section.

Dedicated club software collapses several tools into one and stops you being the bottleneck:

• The squad list stops being a spreadsheet and becomes self-serve via a QR code, with availability collected in the same place.
• Subs and match fees stop being chased and start being collected automatically via Stripe, straight to your club bank account.
• Selection stops being a captain's scrap of paper and becomes a posted lineup against a real formation.
• Messages stop being scattered across WhatsApp and email and live in one members-only chat, with a per-fixture thread.
• Fixtures become a published calendar with capacity limits and automatic refunds when a frozen-off game is cancelled.

ClubLono is free for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — squad list, availability, sessions, 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. The annual plan works out at roughly £16.67/month — about two months free versus monthly billing — and Premium pays for itself comfortably once a club is running multiple teams and a season of league fixtures. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a group of hockey players who'd rather be on the pitch than buried in admin.