I’M SO PASSIONATE ABOUT GETTING PEOPLE INTO HOCKEY
LILY ROWNTREE CITY OF YORK HOCKEY CLUB
Fixtures secretary and Covid officer for City of York Hockey Club, which boasts 600-plus members (aged from four to 70-plus) and 30 plus teams (10 men’s, six ladies’ and around 20 junior teams).
Ihave always played hockey — it’s good for all ages, shapes and sizes and it’s one of the more gender-equal sports.
My husband Paul and I met playing club hockey in London and when we moved to York it was a no-brainer to join the club.
I was actually pregnant with our first child but as soon as I had emily I joined the ladies fourth team. Then I had my second daughter and dipped into the 5s and 6s. I’ve worked my way up to the 1s gradually!
Paul plays, emily is now in the Under 10s (which Paul and I coach) and Sophie, our littlest, is playing beginners.
There are loads of brilliant people — I’m just one of those that helps out. and I’m really lucky because I’m not working at the moment and I wanted to get into volunteering anyway. So when a friend said there was a vacancy for fixtures secretary I took it on.
I used to work in hR and I like being organised. I’ve expanded the role — possibly because I’m a bit of a control freak — so as well as organising fixtures, I also manage the pitches. Before, anybody was booking them and it was a bit of a nightmare. It is quite a lot of bookings — we have between 600 and 700 players — but I quite enjoy it.
every Sunday evening I used to put aside a couple of hours, maybe with a glass of wine, and send out my emails.
But you’re constantly on call. I keep an anxious eye on my phone to see if anybody turns up at the wrong place. It’s probably more hours than I realise.
I keep a keen eye on the weather and if it’s going to be below three degrees you’re looking at a potential frozen pitch.
at the beginning of the pandemic, you could see the seriousness of it all. and I don’t know whether it’s my hR side, but alarm bells were ringing. I thought, ‘We need to make sure that we do this properly’.
I took on the role of Covid officer but when it all started I was in Scotland on holiday. We had a car accident and all of a sudden I was hanging off every bit of battery on my phone and other people’s laptops, trying to get all the Covid stuff organised.
It was about developing really clear guidelines for our players.
We made d sure th there was h hand d sanitiser and the pitches had a one-way system. That sounds straightforward but when people are used to congregating it’s quite hard to snap them out of the routine.
everybody had to sign a player-participation form and also a self-assessment every time they played. I checked over 600 people to make sure they filled in the right forms which was a bit of a nightmare.
It got tricky because one league could have different clubs in multiple ‘tiers’. We’d normally have 16 fixtures each weekend for seniors so you had to figure out: which games can we actually play? That was a big headache!
What has given me the most sleepless nights is knowing that people can become complacent. I was like the Covid police — making sure, without nagging, that people don’t forget.
It’s also been tricky celebrating goals, saying, ‘ We can’t be hugging!’ I’ve been a little bit of a party pooper.
But we didn’t have a single case where somebody caught Covid from another player through hockey.
Once this is over, I’ve got a plan. I’m passionate about trying to get people into the sport and during lockdown england hockey are doing a lot of coaching courses online. I’m currently doing my level two.
Whether it ends up being a career, I’m not sure. I’ve got other hobbies — I’m chair of York Symphony Orchestra — but I’d like to do as much as possible to help both juniors and seniors access the sport.