Leighton Buzzard Hockey Club - Keep us Flying

Aim

Help LBHC raise £20k and come back flying in 22/23, so we continue to provide amazing hockey facilities for all our players & supporters.

Our Club

Established in 1901, Leighton Buzzard Hockey Club (LBHC) is a thriving Club within Bedfordshire with a hugely popular senior, junior and disability membership. Since 1992 we have partnered with Vandkye Upper School to enable us to have a home for our club and our members. 

Our club aims to be a true community club, being totally inclusive regardless or age, ability or  background, which allows our members to join together, from those as young as four, all the way up to 85 years of age. All members and their families are encouraged to play hockey for exercise or to come down and support our teams. It is a great social environment for teas after matches, charity events or just a cup of tea and a friendly chat. 

We have a junior section of approximately 120 ambitious individuals, and a few years ago we started our own youth disability section called “Yes We Can”; part of our aim to allow all abilities to thrive through the physical and social stimulation of hockey. We have had many junior members represent our county and last season our U12s boys represented Bedfordshire in the East Regional In2 Hockey finals. Many of our older members have played in mixed hockey competitions or represented their age group at county level. 

Over lockdown our chairman was incredible and secured us a good quality second hand facility - our first ever onsite clubhouse - which includes a kitchen, main room for hire, two smaller offices, two storage rooms and a toilet. Great efforts were made to raise money to refurbish the clubhouse and it has become a true home to our club as well as a great space for the local community where we have opened our doors to local school, sports clubs, amongst others. 

Community impact

The club works closely with the local community and is committed to developing existing and new relationships. We have worked closely with Vandyke Upper school over the years to continue to use their facilities to play hockey and recently to allow our new clubhouse to be on the school site. Since having our clubhouse onsite the schools sport partnership have been using one of our office spaces during the school term as well as opening our doors to local school children for summer sports activities. 

We have also worked closely with the Leighton Linslade Rotary Club to develop our junior disability hockey, flyerz to ensure hockey and our clubs house - are accessible to all. Flyerz train once a week on Sunday mornings and is ran by volunteers from the club and local community. We continue to have a strong relationship with the Rotary club offering raffle/ auction prizes for us and the hockey club having a presence at the local carnival and jubilee event.

Getting our clubhouse fully up and running will be a real boost to disability hockey at our club. Some of our participants are very weather sensitive and having a warm space for them to take breaks in will enable them to continue playing through the colder months; as well as giving parents, carers, and siblings a comfortable space to spectate from. It will also enable us to run our own Flyerz events, similar to the "Yes We Can Oscars" that the club attended in October this year. 

"In every area there are sports clubs, however in Leighton Buzzard Hockey Club you have a shining example of a club that is truly embedded in its community, whether is pioneering disability sport or helping Santa on his Christmas visits in the town LB Hockey goes above and beyond and that’s what makes it a true Community Sports Club"

Richard Johnson OBE, Leighton Linslade Rotary Club

This year we held our first charity fundraiser for Mind BLMK (Beds, Luton and MK). We organised a 24hr hockey match, raffle, silent auction and tombola to help raise awareness of the amazing service Mind offer to our local area and to ensure nobody tackles a mental health problem alone. We raised an incredible £4734! This has encouraged us to look into raising money for a selected charity each year.

Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games inspiration

During the Commonwealth Games 2022 we had a number of club members volunteer to support the organisation of the event as well as members attend and watch particular events at the Games. This inspired our club to have a more structed volunteer pathway for our juniors and seniors.  As a result we have now set up a Junior Ambassadors programme and we have 8 Ambassadors who regularly help on a Sunday. They work with our qualified coaches, and we hope will be the coaches of the future. We also ran our annual junior summer league open to anyone under the age of 14, but for the first time all team Managers where juniors aged 16 rather than senior coaches or parents. The senior coaches were present and there to help if needed but the juniors we’re in charge of their teams.

The club are very conscious of the drop off rate of teenagers in both playing and coaching sport and we’re hoping to combat this by getting them involved at an earlier age and giving them more responsibility. We also find this is a great way for the juniors to meet some of the senior members and feel more comfortable to transition into seniors rather than quitting the sport all together.  

We’ve also brought in a volunteer umpiring programme for each team. Each week on a Saturday we ask our home teams to put forward a player to umpire alongside a qualified experienced umpire, they will only umpire our Ladies and Men’s lower teams to help build their confidence and to have more umpires across the club. To help attract players to this programme anyone who umpires will have their match fees for that week covered, this can help those with a lower socio-economic background afford to continue to play for the club. 

As a club we’re very aware of inequalities faced by our local community and to attract those from the low socio-economic groups we’re running a kit exchange programme so no child needs to purchase their own stick, as we will provide those for them and we’re offering reductions on kit such as Astros as we’re aware this can often be a barrier to participation. Similarly, with the seniors we have match day shirts that people can borrow through-out the season and we offer those who may struggle to pay for subs a reduce fee and for anyone who umpires or coaches the club will help cover their match day fees.  

Like most clubs we will always offer to pay for someone to do a coaching or umpiring course on the condition they put that back into the club. We also love to inspire and help our juniors reach their full potentially, so we now have some coaches who help with county coaching and will support those players along the player pathway if appropriate 

We pride ourselves on being a friendly and inclusive club where everyone can reach their full potential as a player, helper, coach or volunteer. A lovely quote from a parent of a recent joiner said:

“My son isn’t the sportiest of children and is not picked for any school activity but has found playing for LBHC really easy to transition into and looks forward to coming every Sunday”.

Why are we crowdfunding?

As you can imagine as a club we have been hit by the Covid-19 shutdowns and the financial impact of this cannot be underestimated. Lost income together with additional costs to get the clubhouse up and running has left us unable to finish our clubhouse project.

Over the years we have been raising money to be able to have our own clubhouse. In 2020 this become a reality and it has been incredible to have our clubhouse on our doorstep. The fundraising effort before Covid-19 enabled us to perform a full internal refit of the building including lighting, heating, fire alarm, fit a suspended ceiling, fit out a kitchen and move the door to include a ramp that would make it truly accessible for all.

However, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done to have the clubhouse fully functional - in particular connecting up the water to the mains at Vandyke School, to allow for fully a working kitchen and toilet facilities. 

With the clubhouse being the central point for our hockey community and a welcoming environment for parents and carers to come in to the warm during winter months, we want this to be a place of comfort and to show our community what our community club is all about.

But its not just the clubhouse that needs development. Our Fantastic Flyerz / Yes we can section is going from strength to strength. And to keep this momentum going we will be putting a significant amount into growth and development. New kit, upskilling our coaches, improving outreach and signage, and running socials will all be a real positive for the team.

How we’ll spend the money raised

Every penny counts as we aim to hit our £10k target. The grant money we receive will go to the following priority areas:

• Link up water to the clubhouse - use of the toilet, dishwasher and sink (Approx £12k)
• New windows (Approx £5K)
• Decorate the outside and inside of the clubhouse (Approx £1K)
• Grow our Flyerz presence with additional equipment, signage and coaches (Approx £2k)

How you can play your part

There are four simple ways to help us reach our target, and make this project a reality.

1. Make a pledge and claim your reward. Don’t delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success!

2. Spread the word. Share our project on your social media pages and tell the world to get behind us! The more people we reach, the more support we will get.

3. Offer rewards yourself. Get involved if you are a local business by donating things we can offer to our supporters. We will give you a shout out!

4. Create a fundraiser of your own. Use the button on our page to get started. Setting up your own page only takes a few minutes and you won’t need any bank details. Just a fun idea!

This project successfully funded on 1st November 2022