Helping Youngsters Discover a “Sport for Life”

England Hockey’s 2025 Unsung Hero award winner Richard Kirtley reflects on the success of revitalising junior hockey in Sheffield.

Kirtley was presented with the Unsung Hero award in June for his sterling work in grassroots junior hockey - leading successful free summer camps Sheffield and creating a thriving youth section from scratch at his local club.

On winning the award, he said, “to be honest, I felt like a bit of an imposter because it was a massive culmination of a lot of people's really hard work.

“I’d like to thank the Sheffield University Bankers Hockey Club Committee, for doing an absolutely fantastic job of making hockey sessions for our juniors really safe and welcoming.”

“Thank you to the coaches as well, Matt and Will - and actually just a lot of the club that has gotten behind us.”

“I think last summer we had around 30 different volunteers help us out, so I would say to all those people who I frantically called on a Sunday night saying ‘I don't suppose you could just come and help us out’, thank you as well, because it meant that we could actually run rather than having to cancel and that goes a long way!”

“It was a really, really amazing team effort to get us to this point.”

A hockey lover from the age of 14, Richard has always shown tremendous passion for the sport, first playing at school and for Jesmond Parish Church, before moving away to university in Sheffield, the city he would later call his home.

He then joined Sheffield University Bankers Hockey Club where he has spent the last three years as club secretary, overseeing the formation of the junior section, before more recently being named vice-chairman.

However, Richard’s ambition to establish a new junior section at the club didn’t arise until the birth of his son.

“My first child, William, came on the scene and I was sat there thinking ‘I've got five years before he can start playing. What would it take for us to have a proper, well-integrated junior set up by the time that he can start playing?’ so I started to think of ideas.”

“One of the things that we thought about was to engage existing members and their kids, but there just wasn't enough.”

“So, what we wanted to do was essentially try and find a foothold in our community that meant that we could get kids from the local area stuck into the sport.”

“Where we are up in the Norton area of Sheffield there's some wonderful community spirit, and there's some wonderful community connections, which means that if you can work with even just one little arm, one little part of that community, then the word spreads and that's a really lovely thing.”

Subsequently, in 2023 Richard pulled together a coalition of organisations, including both of Sheffield’s universities, a local, professional coaching agency, a quality kit supplier and keen volunteers from the club, to organise free summer hockey camps for the local communities of Norton Woodseats, Meadowhead, and Gleadless Valley.

“It just so happened that a friend from university, Matt (who is now our performance coach as well) and his colleague Will, were looking to run junior hockey camps.

“They got in touch with me and said, ‘should we try something? Something where you are?’ And I said, ‘yeah, let's give it a go!’”

“So, we got in touch with the university [Sheffield], they've been really good to us, and they said we could have the pitch for free that summer to do our camps.”

“We got a bit of money together to get the equipment and bought a whole range of sticks, balls, stuff like that, and we ran 6 summer camps with the idea being that in September we would then run regular weekly sessions.”

Richard and his team were blown away by the response and the attendance to the camps. He said, “We didn't know how it was going to go - we were very prepared for it to be a failure. But that summer we had 180 kids from the local community coming to play sport and they were aged from five right the way through to 14 - a massively good spread.”

“It got to September and we sent an e-mail around saying ‘we're going to start [regular sessions] this week’ and that first week we had about 50 kids come along, and I was like, ‘whoa, that's pretty wild!’”

“Like I say, I feel like a bit of an imposter because we had quite a nice rub of the green, so to speak, and we had a lot of favourable conditions.”

“We've run the summer camp since and continued to grow organically, but then also with new things going on too - amazingly, we've got parents now playing who'd previously played and that's actually meant that we've been able to start an over 35’s veteran side this year.”

Of the 180-strong contingent of youngsters that attended the summer camps, 48% had never played the sport before, highlighting Richard’s success in constructing a new hockey community in Sheffield.

“For me, to be able to share hockey with kids who maybe hadn't had the chance to play before was brilliant and what's been really nice is seeing those kids progress.”

“I do pinch myself quite regularly. When I've done the register and there's 30/40 kids there I'm just like, ‘wow! We didn't have this three years ago. This is this is quite something.’”

“We've now found the funding to send one of our coaches into schools to deliver sessions - in this winter term, we've engaged with over 300 kids already who haven't played hockey before, or maybe a handful have - and we've now got them coming along to regular, weekly sessions.”

Looking towards the future, Richard hopes that his efforts can spark real change for the sport in the wider South Yorkshire region. He said, “we’ve got to keep our foot on the accelerator, I actually caught up with one of our club members the other day and we were talking about what’s next for hockey in South Yorkshire.”

“We could build this kind of model in the whole of the South Yorkshire region and find additional funding to enable that. I'd love to work with the other clubs in the region to try and do that and to figure out what that would look like.”

“We've got a little bit of a pitch issue in Sheffield and that that's kind of stagnating hockey a little bit. I think there's maybe seven or eight [pitches] maximum in the whole of the South Yorkshire region that are hockey playable and that's a population of about 1.4 million people. So, what would it look like for us to build on that foundation and to show that there's this brilliant demand and to start building a case for infrastructural development, which could then support that?”

“Now, I'm a realist. That is a big old project right there. That is huge. That is something which is a long way away. But I’m more and more convinced that if we can continue to do this really good foundational community work, opportunities to make that happen will come. You will get too noisy for potentially the big bodies out there, the government even, to ignore you. That's what I think we can really do – that's my aspiration for the region.”

He also extended an open invitation to the rest of the country’s hockey community who might want to replicate his work in Sheffield.

“I always say this, but if any other club wants to find out about what we did, how we did it, how we secured some of the funding, etcetera, get in touch - we'd love to have a chat! I can't promise I've got all the answers, but I can talk about what worked for us and see if we can give it a go because I'm passionate that this works elsewhere.”

“I want it to be open source. I don't want it to be this closed solution that works only for us. I want this to be a something which grows the sport for everyone ultimately.”

“One thing that's really brilliant about hockey is you can go pretty much anywhere in the country and there'll always be a club that will welcome you with open arms, and for youngsters, I think there's a real opportunity for you to get stuck into something which can become a sport for life.”