Renewals 2025/26

Dear Hawks Member,

Now the summer term is coming to an end, it’s time to renew memberships for next season. Don’t worry, there’s a couple of months of glorious sunshine and holiday happiness to enjoy first, we will kick off the next hockey season on Sunday 7th of September, once the kids are back at school.

We would terribly grateful if you can renew or confirm otherwise, before the beginning of August. There’s a fair bit of organising to do at our end, including various league entry deadlines, so having everyone’s responses in good time would be immensely helpful.

Some important things (I’m sure not all, please ask questions) to know ahead of the new season.

More money, we’re sorry!

England Hockey, our esteemed governing body, has rather significantly increased the affiliation costs clubs now have to bear. To be fair, this has been a long time coming; our sport hasn’t exactly been awash with funding for useful endeavours, and England Hockey has, for several years, endeavoured to avoid passing on extra costs to clubs.

If you possess a masochistic interest in the intricate details of why and by how much they’ve increased costs, this webpage will, no doubt, make it suitably confusing for you: https://www.englandhockey.co.uk/deliver/club-membership/new-club-membership-model

Key highlights (for those who prefer the abridged version):

• With the extra funds, England Hockey plans to make their coaching courses free, enhance online hockey viewing options, and establish a proper fund for expanding the sport to children in state schools. All of these are undoubtedly worthy causes and will (fingers crossed!) contribute to a more professional and larger sport, which can only be a good thing.
• We were rather fortunate last year in that they hadn’t quite figured out how to charge a junior-only club, so our outlay was minimal. Now, we’re facing an additional £10 per U8/U10/U12 member and £16 per U14/U16 member.
• This new pricing structure applies to every club and is actually a bit more for adult members, so we’re still in a relatively good position.

In addition to England Hockey’s increased fees, we’ve basically rounded up the membership fees to a £20 increase for everyone, with the U8s seeing a more modest £10 rise.

We concluded our first season with a modest cash surplus of about £1,000 from a turnover of around £50,000. Before you accuse us of poor financial acumen, one of our founding principles at Hawks was to reinvest everything you pay directly into benefiting the children. Therefore, we’re not aiming for vast surpluses.

Given that a few of us made some initial investments, we do need to raise a little more next season to ensure we can continue to provide those lovely extra things like quality equipment, good systems, those rather funky orange t-shirts, and hopefully have a little something left over for some extra bonuses. This is all factored into the additional £20 for most members.

Going the Extra Mile (Quite Literally)

While the new fees will comfortably cover our basics, we’d dearly love to do more. We’d like to support members who might struggle with subs, invest in some indoor equipment, expand our outreach in local schools, provide more medals and certificates as recognition for our members, further support coach progression, subsidise social activities, and offer more of those much-loved match teas after home games.

Therefore, during the renewal process, the system will offer a completely optional donation product. If you are able, and would like to help us support some of these extra projects, please consider making a small donation to the club. As a charity, we can claim Gift Aid on these donations, so a little truly does go a long way (25% further, in fact!).

Your training sessions

Each new season necessitates a slight tweak to training days. Because junior hockey is split into two school year groups, it’s almost an impossible feat to keep the same midweek training slot for everyone.

Access this page for information on which training days are relevant to each age group: 

https://hawkshockeyclub.org.uk/training-days/ 

All sessions will be held at Worth School.

The Renewal Process (Hopefully) Painless

If you had a Membership Subscription in 2024/25, the system has been set up (with fingers firmly crossed) to automatically offer you the relevant subscription for the 25/26 season.

You can access this offer on this webpage “MY SUBSCRIPTIONS” where you should see the relevant membership type and be able to “Accept” or “Decline” the subscription. 

If you “Accept,” the subscription will be added to your basket, and you can complete the purchase (either monthly instalments or a one-off payment) through a familiar online checkout process.

We suspect the system will harass you regularly by email until you take action. Our apologies in advance, but the automation does save us a considerable amount of work!

IMPORTANT: If anything appears amiss with your subscription offer, please do email us, and we’ll sort it out tout de suite. If your desired membership type at Hawks has changed, please email us, and we’ll sort it. If you need more information about anything before rejoining (seeing a pattern here?), email us, and we’ll sort it. Basically, “see it, say it, sort it” – we rather enjoy a good natter!

What’s New in the 25/26 Season?

We kept things fairly simple in our inaugural year, and on the whole, it resulted in us providing good quality hockey for everyone.

Now that we’ve settled in, we’re going to warp factor 2 and are looking to add some things we think our members will appreciate:

• Hawks Skills Academy: This will be an extra, optional weekly slot for those looking to improve personal skills, above and beyond the progress they’ll make within their age group.
• Indoor Hockey: We intend to utilise indoor hockey for both skills development and competition.

Details of these modest enhancements will materialise in the coming weeks.

A Heartfelt Thank You

We also just wanted to reiterate our sincere thanks for your support. It was no small feat for us to start a new club, and a considerable act of trust for you to entrust Hawks with your son’s or daughter’s club hockey. Thank you!