The Time is nigh
Welcome back, Wappers! Apologies for the lack of updates lately. There has been a lot going on but seeing all your beautiful faces enjoying the pre-season fun has made it totally worth it.
SO, with start of season rapidly approaching here’s all the info you need to know, along with the summer news from across the club.
Things you need to do:
Register on GMS if you didn’t sign up last year.
Go to training. With lots of new people joining, and to ensure you’re playing in the right team, it’s important to make it down to training as much as you can. New training times are below
Head down to the Moretown Belle on Saturday (21st @ 6pm) for our Start of Season Social to celebrate our first wins of the season! 🏆
Plan how to pay your membership fees (more on this below)
Join Wapping on Easyfundraising - this raises vital funds for the club while you shop online
Important updates
Save Our Pitch. Again.
As you may be aware, we have recently faced issues making bookings at the John Orwell centre so I wanted to provide a brief update on the situation and why you haven’t seen any October onwards fixtures scheduled.
In April, Tower Hamlets Council took over operation of all leisure centres in the borough. On the 17th of August we received notification that the Director of Culture would like to have a meeting with all Tower Hamlets based hockey clubs to discuss provision within the borough. At that meeting, at which Wapping, East London, The Royals and Tower Hamlets hockey club were in attendance, all clubs were advised that pitch allocations would be reviewed under the new management, and pitch allocation based on an assessment of the clubs.
From then on a dedicated team have been working day and night to retain access to the pitch we’ve called home for the last 36 years. Late last week we received an update from the council advising we have retained the majority of our Saturday slots at John Orwell, including our Kidds session, so are now in a position to allocate fixtures.
We’ve lost a slot every other week which isn’t ideal but given the discussions that were had, and options proposed, this is by far the best outcome we could have achieved.
I would like to say a massive thanks to Stuart Burnside, Amy Winklegrund, Sandra Akinbolu, Alex Corrie, Eleanor Tennant and Irini Kounoupias for their significant support on the matter, and to everyone who completed the forms and polls or provided any other advice. We started this game on the back foot, but I couldn’t have asked for a better defence.
Committee
We are still looking for
a Newsletter Secretary to send out this nifty newsletter each week.
someone with accountancy experience/a numbers brain who’s keen to help us make the most of our finances.
Please let our Club Secretary, Irini, know if you're able to help or would like more information on the above.
Training and coaching
Our Head Coach, Matt Bowen, and VCPs, Lizzie and Jenna, have pulled off mini miracle to come up with a training schedule that works for all our coaches, teams and pitch slots and we're very grateful for their efforts. You should already be well in the swing of it but on the off chance you’ve just returned from summer hols, training times are as follows:
Costs and membership fee
As mentioned last year, and reminded about at AGM, the club is facing significantly increased costs since covid, so we have been unable to freeze membership fees again (as we did two years prior).
For those who are not aware:
match fees cover match day costs (pitch costs and teas) and membership covers our training and additional costs.
We have a dedicated sponsorship team who work hard to source additional income. Thanks to sponsors like Simon Wright, the Moretown Belle, Savill’s, grants from Tesco, Sports England and London Hockey and our City and Wharf League we are able to offer free kit shirts and numerous training and outreach initiatives that we wouldn’t have been able offer to otherwise, including Back2 Hockey.
We also sell merch and run fundraisers, profits from which are considered when budgeting and calculating membership fees
Membership fees can be paid via our website here and the deadline for payment is Friday 4th October. We operate a ‘no pay, no play’ policy for anyone who hasn’t paid after this date.
As always, if you are struggling financially or costs will be a barrier to you participating this season, please reach out in confidence to our treasurer. Our policy is to facilitate hockey for all.
A table showing this year’s membership fees is below.
Kit
I would like to add that, despite there being a lot of missing shirts at the end of last season, we have (just) been able to make the shirts we still have work, so the increase in membership has not been affected by that. However, with additional cost pressures this season, we need to be more careful than ever with our kit. We are really proud that we offer shirts to players, helping to keep costs down, but it's imperative that these are looked after, alongside the other items. We have allocated teams a kit bag and will be asking them to replace anything that is lost over the course of the year.
And finally it’s worth adding that if you’re in need of new Wapping socks or discounted shinnies you can buy them from our shop here.
Squads and selection
This season we are entering an eighth women's team into the league, reflecting our club's continued growth. This should ease the problems we faced last year whereby squads were very large and availability each week often exceeded the maximum game-day squad size. With this, there will therefore be a lot of movement at all levels which will predominantly be at the discretion of the coaches, with some input from captains.
We hope that initial squads on both the Men’s and Women’s sides will be drafted in the coming weeks so that teams can train as they will play however please note that no squad is final at this point. So, if you'd like to be considered for a higher team, train hard and let your club captains know (wappinglcc@gmail.com/ wappingmcc@gmail.com)
Fixtures
We are experiencing a delay in confirming home fixtures due to the above issues with the Council. Our Fixtures Secretaries, Eleanor and Jen, are working really hard and as soon as information is available it will be pulled through to individual team spreadsheets. If you think any info is incorrect, or have any updates, please let them know (wappingfixtures@gmail.com)
Coaching and Umpiring
There are loads of ways to give back to the club, and two of the most important ways are through coaching and umpiring. We have installed a new Coaching Development Officer, the brilliant DvS, who can help anyone who is hoping to get into coaching, and to support the coaches we already have at all levels of the club. If anyone is interested in finding out more, please contact him on wappingcdo@gmail.com - there is no obligation for weekly commitment and there is heaps of support available; we are really excited to continue developing our home-grown talent.
Speaking of coaches, huge congratulations to As, coach of the Men’s 2-4s who has been appointed Head Coach for French Men’s O40s, and will be accompanying the team to the World Cup in Cape Town.
We have also worked hard with our Umpire Development Officers, Dan, Phil and James, who did some fantastic work during CAWHL supporting new umpires. This included them umpiring games alongside newer umpires, and having matches where they remained off-pitch and talked through the decisions as they were made. These guys have loads of experience and umpire at the top levels so we are really lucky that they give us so much time, please do use them. A reminder that there are weekly online Level 1 courses open to all so get in touch with the lads if you’d like to know more (wappingudo@gmail.com).
We’d also like to say a big thanks to last year’s ULO, Jane, who will reprise the role later this year. It's not always an easy job and is made significantly easier with more umpires trained up and more people agreeing to oversee the odd game.
SUMMER NEWS
Back2Hockey
Wapping ran another incredibly successful Back2Hockey programme this summer, which has led to plenty of new faces at training across the club. We will continue to offer free Back2Hockey sessions fortnightly all year round. This is a big step forward for us in relation to goals around inclusion and community so I want to formally thank our Head B2H coach, Kiran, who has been utterly fantastic. If you’d like to get involved helping coach those sessions (Mon 19:30 @ JO) please let DvS know, this is a great place to kick off your coaching career, especially if staying on for training afterwards.
Summer League
CAWHL was as enjoyable as ever this season, with 28 teams participating to eventually crown Goldman Sachs, Accenture and SA Saints champions of the Bowl, Plate and Cup respectively. The league was rounded out in true Wapping style with the six-a-side tournament and End of Season Dinner. Huge thanks to Alex Corrie and the team for delivering such a smashing summer.
In other summer news, congratulations to our Men’s performance squad who won the Elite League at Lee Valley!
Club Day
We kicked off the new season with our annual Club Day on August 31st. This year’s Club Day was bigger than ever with morning yoga, a strength & conditioning challenge by our new partners, Eastside Fitness, and a super social at Hackney Bridge to finish off the night.
Matt and the 1s delivered a masterclass to our Kidds in the morning which they loved, followed by a mixed tournament and exhibition games from the M1s and L1s. A huge thanks to our sponsor, Savills, for supporting the day. As always, any love you can send our sponsors’ ways makes a big difference to the club.
Thank you
Finally, a massive thank you to everyone who supported the club last season and will continue to support the club going forward. This includes everyone on the Exec, Committee, Coaches, Umpires, Kidds volunteers and those who help out on a more ad hoc basis. You are all superstars and we are so excited for another great season ahead
Member discounts:
Check out our Members' area (Password: whc1989) which has all of our available offers, including:
20% off NuSmile dentists
A free Psycle session
Grubby: 50% off + free delivery on 1st box, plus 30% off for the rest of the month
10% off all beers at Tap East
