At the beginning of the 2018/19 year The University of Surrey Hockey Club had two main aims regarding volunteering: to create more opportunities for our members to develop their individual skills and to increase our presence within the wider Guildford community. Alongside two of our members volunteering weekly as assistant coaches for Team Surrey Spartans Junior club, we have been trying to organise opportunities for more of our members to get involved with volunteering by using the hockey skills they already have.

The first event we helped with in 2019 was a Quicksticks Festival held at Surrey Sports Park. Quicksticks happens all over the country and is an initiative of England Hockey. The Festival we saw over 100 year 9-11 year olds from primary schools around the Guildford area taking part. We had 11 members of the hockey club helping out primarily with umpiring the matches but also doing short coaching sessions and probably the most chaotic task – the warm up! (stuck in the mud with 100 children). The festival took place over one afternoon so worked really well alongside our member's schedules that are already packed with uni work, social lives and lots of hockey training and matches. The festival would have struggled to run without us as we oversaw the matches and it was lovely hearing how appreciative the organisers and schools were. Throughout March three members of our committee are giving a series of four hockey sessions at a local primary school, less than a mile away from SSP. Many of the children we are coaching have not played hockey before whilst those who may have, are not doing so on a regular basis. TeamSurrey granted four members of UOSHC places on a coaching course for children. It has been so great putting our training into practice, seeing for ourselves how much enjoyment the children get from playing, and finally, being able to provide a free service for the school who wouldn't have hockey sessions if it weren't for us. We hope, as a club, to keep this relationship with the primary school for future short-term programmes.

We have also volunteered at a few external events around the Guildford area: The Hog's Back Race, Kelly's 10km and Surrey Half Marathon. Whether it be handing out water, registering runners, cheering or giving medals at the finish line it's been great to be able to be a part of large-scale events. Every member of a sports team has the core skills of communication, teamwork and decision-making to be a valuable volunteer at events and to put these skills into new scenarios. We also hope that we are proving that students do care about the area we are studying in, want to give back to the community and most importantly for us increase the participation of hockey especially amongst young people.

UOSHC set a target to record 400 hours of volunteering before the end of the season. We are so pleased to say that we smashed this target in the second week of March. We are now aiming for 500 hours to be completed by the end of March! We have created ten different volunteering opportunities for our members to get involved with and we hope this carries forward in the future.

Kezia Buckland
UOSHC Chairlady