Firstly, I’ve always had some sort of involvement in the sport since picking it up when I was a teenager. After university, when I first started to look at a career my first role was at England Hockey as an Administrator. Then I moved away and worked for Oxford Sports Partnership. After that, I spent several years as the manager of the Senior Women’s International Hockey Team before moving to Sports England as a Relationship Manager. I came back to England Hockey when the Business Development Director role became available – so I’ve been doing this role now since 2013.

As the Business Development Director I basically oversee all the development activities the organisation does. At the moment, with COVID, my role is a bit broader with COVID guidance and looking after the competition team being in my remit.

Sitting in my department at the moment I have:

• The competition team.
• The workforce development team.
• The facilities team.
• The clubs team.
• And the participation programme.

So, I’m really responsible for everything to do with trying to grow the team and the sport.

All the Directors at England Hockey are Executive Directors so I spend time sitting on the Board as well.

We like to think we’re very close to our clubs and players and the ins-and-outs of the day-to-day working of the sport.

We’re undertaking a governance review and looking at the way the sport is structured and realigning our leagues and the way our competitions are run.

The clubs we work with every year, in one way or another, are direct members of EH – which is about 70% of England’s clubs which represent around 90% of our players. So we have a very close relationship with our clubs who run the most of the games – because it’s obviously a club based sport. The majority of where it’s played is either at clubs or educational institutions (schools, universities). So we like to think we’re very integral to the sport’s grassroots.

One thing to point out is that the most clubs don’t own their facilities – only around 10% do. The rest are owned by local authorities or by schools, colleges, and universities etc. This can present us with some problems though.

Despite our limited resources, we like to think we give as much support to our clubs as we can.

We have three Facilities Relationship Managers who cover the work that goes on around facilities over the country.

There are around 1,000 pitches and the Facility Managers work on the playing pitch strategies that each local authority has to identify the needs for their area. That covers every single club in the country and their facility needs. We offer advice and support to these playing pitch strategies to make sure that, as far as possible, the right pitches are provided in the right places. Alongside that, we offer advice and guidance to anyone developing facilities.

The same is true across the breath of what we do. We train thousands of coaches every year with both face-to-face and online courses. We offer club forums where we get clubs together to talk about how to develop themselves and the sport. We run national knockout competitions and set up the framework through which junior and adult matches are run and delivered.

With the changes we’re making, we’ve taken overseeing the governance of the sport right down to a local level too.

One of the things we’re doing this year is developing a new game IT management system that all the fixtures and results will be organised through. This will massively streamline the amount of admin club officials have to go through.

So we do a huge amount to try to support clubs to develop themselves and their role in their communities.

The range and size of our clubs varies massively. Our largest club has on the way to 1,800 players. It’s run like a business and is out there developing the game in the community around it. Our support really focuses on trying to help clubs to be part of the local community and to develop themselves. Our clubs are highly motivated and do an outstanding job doing that.

We see everything really. The energy and drive of our coaches and volunteers, a mix of paid and volunteer roles, is incredible. The kind of things you see them doing? Open days, junior activities, school outreach work. We’ve got a programme around learning disability hockey called Flyers Hockey that’s being run by our clubs. There are around 50 Flyers Hockey clubs around the country being run by our passionate volunteers trying to make sure hockey is for everybody. So we have brilliant activities going on.

All clubs are on that developmental journey and there’s an amazing amount of effort going on into keeping the game thriving locally led by the clubs.

GB Hockey is a vehicle for the International Teams effectively. The way GB hockey works is it’s a company with a board that delegates the delivery of the Olympic teams to what is called the ‘nominated country’. This is whichever team is highest ranked and usually that’s England. For most of the time the current structure has been in place England has been the nominated country and England will lead the GB Hockey programme.

The coaches that are selected for the GB Hockey programme pick the squad and the GB Hockey board oversee the selection. The nominated country’s head coach is normally selected as the GB hockey head coach and we carefully manage and negotiate the politics of the selection.

We’re currently going through a strategy review at the moment. What’s an absolute given is that the clubs and participation are at the heart of the game for hockey. And we have other ambitions around growing the visibility and profile of the sport and using that to grow participation. But clubs are at the heart of everything we do.

Like everybody we have resource challenges and the beauty of partnerships we’ve struck up is that they extend our expertise.

I think that’s the real opportunity of working together with partners like Midstream. Your specialist knowledge is something we haven’t got the capacity to have within ourselves. Being able to work closely with a partner allows us to mutually develop an understanding, knowledge, and expertise of a marketplace. On our own as EH we’d never be able to get to the level of detail we can with your support. That allows us to stay up to date with technological developments, guidance, and expectations which is a huge opportunity.

We have a great relationship with the FIH (International Hockey Federation) and Alistair Cox, the Facilities Leader there too. So between the relationship we have with Alistair, and our own relationships with our partners, we really feel we are able to give a lot more support to our clubs that we’d otherwise be able to.

The first thing we can be sure of is our team, who offer the first line of advice for clubs and facilities, is that they can go to partners such as Midstream with any challenges or issues they have. So I feel that our own team is being developed by these partnerships and that ultimately means the level of service to clubs is improving.

I think that in turn the partnerships can deliver things clubs need. Many clubs and organisations, like schools and universities, benefit from partners coming in and giving them advice and being on call. I think we’ve been able to work with partners to understand what the market needs. E.g. So working with Notts Sports and the FIH we’ve developed our Gen 2 programme. This is focused around giving clubs a choice away from the less environmentally friendly 3G surfaces that football is played on.

I think that these types of things are exactly what we want to strike up with partners like yourselves and deliver to improve our service and quality offering to our clubs and the hockey community.

Well firstly, it was a competitive process with other lighting suppliers in the mix. I think that’s healthy. It’s what business do. We were keen to find a company that shared our longer-term ambitions. That’s been key to developing relationships like the ones we have with other partners. We want to sustain a partnership for a very long time. We want partnerships that are built on the added value for both ourselves and our partners in the relationship.

I think that the discussions that were held with Midstream Lighting and our Facilities and Partnerships teams it was felt there was a good alignment with what we want to achieve. I think that was the most important thing for us. Midstream Lighting is our newest partner in the space but I think the ambition and ability to deliver shone through very strongly in the discussions.

We want to build a brand awareness and trust within our community of our partners too. And so we wanted to make sure we were making the right choice. And the early days of this partnership is that there’s definitely the right intent on both sides of it – which I think is really positive to hear from the team.

I think firstly, from a direct perspective, the provision of lighting on synthetic pitches is mission critical. We’re a winter sport, people train in the evenings, matches are played through into the early evenings. So, in terms of maximising the capacity of facilities, lighting is vital and everybody needs it. The ability to provide that to clubs and give them good choices to allow them to ensure what is delivered is to a good standard and a good quality is essential. You can’t get away from the fact that we need lights and Midstream provides world-class floodlighting. A perfect match.

I think more broadly that the educational role that partners have around things like maintenance, choices, sustainability, and asset management are all things that add value and provide the support we need to give to our clubs and facility operators. We want to grow this and then we’d like to look, as the relationship develops, into more broad roles that MS can provide and play in the game.

Notts Sports, our sports surface partners, found a good way to operate in this space by building a brand relationship with clubs by supporting some of our programmes like Schools Championship. This gave them a good brand awareness but also gave them a chance to feel like they’re also really a partner with us on so many levels.

One of the biggest challenges we faced came after the Olympics in Rio in 2016. Following our success there too many people were signing up to play. This meant many clubs needed to expand their capacity and facilities. It’s still a great challenge in the game for us as a whole.

The financial viability and sustainability of facilities, the ownership of facilities, the maintenance and standards of facilities are all at the heart of what clubs face every day and challenging. So it’s absolutely at the heart.

As I mentioned we’ve been, and still are, challenged with the conversion of pitches to 3G pitches where they need to be used for football.

But to move back to Midstream territory the quality of light at venues is a huge challenge. The maintenance of leisure centre contracts and the contracting out of facilities from local authorities is challenging where people are reaching the end of their contracts and don’t want to spend anything on improving things like lighting.

Generally in a university setting facilities are well maintained because of the budgets available. But when you’re talking about schools and local authorities, their budgets have been really squeezed in the last five to ten years. Despite the fact that many of our clubs have been paying £15,000 to £20,000 a year to rent out those facilities often they won’t have been suitably maintained. When you’re a leisure centre trying to keep a pool warm and the gym open, the outside space gets neglected.

So there are a huge amount of challenges we face and the more we can provide in the way of guidance, help, quick responses to challenges the better the game can carry on without getting interrupted.

Firstly we’re incredibly grateful for the support Sport England and UK Sports throughout the pandemic.

There’s no doubt COVID has ‘bitten’ everyone. We’ve come through it fairly well in the circumstances and our focus now is on recovery as much as anything.

But last season we cancelled all our league games and all our spectator events. We haven’t run a spectator event for two summers and the whole of last winter. So we’ve had a significant challenge there in terms of keeping the game going.

Our clubs have been amazingly resilient though. When they’ve been told they can play, they’ve got out there and played. We’ve given COVID guidance as quickly as we can and offered support.

In terms of the health benefits, physical and mental, the importance of people getting out there and playing team sports has been evident during this period. People have been desperate to get out there and clubs, particularly outdoor sports clubs like hockey, have when possible provided environments where people have felt safe.

We now need to concentrate the most on the opportunities COVID has presented to make improvements to the game. Improvements such as embedding our new governance changes and technologies we’ve invested in to help take the sport forward.

There’s a bit of waiting and seeing if there are going to be any more interruptions and how much this season will run normally. We’re all set up to run this season as usual. We’re out there selling tickets for events and trying to get the sport back on the go. But there’s still a lot of uncertainty about international travel for our international teams, there are concerns about whether there will be further restrictions and things like that. We are waiting to see on some of them and constantly having to adjust our plans as we have for the last 18 months. But feeling resilient and focusing on the opportunities now.

One thing I can be sure of is that, from a grassroots perspective, the clubs are incredible and the health they’re in and the work they do continues to drive hockey forward. This will go on because there’s such an outstanding infrastructure of clubs. There are local challenges and local issues but the core of clubs have developed incredibly robust and strong plans and are extremely ambitious about how they want to progress their clubs.

The game is very strong at a grassroots level. It all starts with the grassroots and that’s where our focus is and should be.

We’re changing our talent programme too. So whilst we think we’ve had great international success, we think we can and we want to be even better. We’re looking to develop a slightly more club based talent model. This will be based on leanings we’ve taken from other team sports internationally, not just hockey.

We’ve got some really ambitious plans to keep moving the sport forwards and growing through to a sustained period of international success

I went to a state school where you played a few sports, but not that many. We played a lot of basketball for example because the teacher liked it. So, most of my personal experience has been from joining sports and playing in the local community.

I grew up playing ball sports with some friends on the outfield of the cricket club my dad played at for the local working men’s club in the middle of Swindon. I’d even play for the Extra 2nd team when they were short of players.

When I was 13, I decided to try something different and got into hockey. I was hooked. I’ve played all through my school days right through to university. After university I played at my local club in Oxford where I ended up as chairman at a very young age. That’s the brilliant thing about hockey. It’s so inclusive. When I was fourteen and played for the 4th team in Swindon there was a guy in goal aged 78.

I personally feel strongly that sport in the community is really important. It’s where you meet people from different backgrounds. If you only play sports at school, you don’t end up with the memories and stories that will stay with you for a lifetime. Local clubs help develop communities and your own understanding of life.

It was weird watching the Olympics being held from behind closed doors. When I was the Women’s International Team Manager, I went to the 2010 Commonwealth Games which was amazing. My current role though doesn’t require me to attend events like this in person though now.

I think it was very different and hard to be there in Tokyo for the athletes and everyone involved this time around. But they went there with the mindset that it was the right thing to do – which I think was the right approach to have.

The women’s hockey team now having won medals in the last three Olympics is unbelievable. As a nation, we rarely do well in team sports – outside of cycling. So, the team’s achievement is phenomenal.

I support the UK’s stock of athletics facilities by providing guidance and support in terms of things like sustainability, maintenance, good practice. I advise on the design and build of new, innovative athletics and running facilities too.

I also manage TrackMark – UK Athletics’ facility accreditation scheme. Its aim is to make sure all facilities meet certain standards across key areas including safety, rulebook compliance, and accessibility. So, again, it involves giving advice and guidance to facility operators across the UK and pointing them in the direction of approved suppliers like Midstream.

Good question… To give some context, the vast majority of synthetic track and field facilities in the UK were built in the 1980s and early 90s. This means there’s a lot of facility stock out there that’s over 30-years old. Looking purely at the synthetic track surface of these aging facilities, they typically need to be resprayed every seven years and fully resurfaced every 25 years. In the UK we estimate that around 50% of track stock has not been resprayed or resurfaced for at least ten years. This is a big challenge, but one that we are starting to address with the TrackMark programme.

It’s not just about the track of course. We look at all the elements that make up the field of play for track and field athletics, and floodlighting is absolutely an essential part of that. Competitively we’re a summer sport, but we’re a participation sport all year round. To support the continued development of our sport we need 365 days a year floodlighting provision that meets minimum safety standards. However, akin to track surfaces, the floodlighting at many venues has reached, or past, its operating lifetime. Depending on what type of floodlighting it is, particularly old systems like Metal Halide floodlighting, it’s almost certainly not delivering the minimum standards needed across the whole track and infield.

Our ambition as a sport isn’t to build lots of new 400m tracks – in most areas of the UK we have good coverage already. Critically, it’s about bringing that 30-year old stock up to the right standards.

We’ve got a team of Club Support Managers who work very closely with our member clubs and the local communities. Their job is to support clubs and make sure members and visitors have a great experience when they visit the track. Volunteer clubs are the driving force of athletics and they do far more than just deliver track and field coaching programmes. They also reach out to the local community to offer opportunities for everyone – from school-based activity to Couch to 5k. The work that our member clubs do is incredible and forms the bedrock of our sport.

Lockdown has shown us there’s a real appetite out there amongst a lot of people to get involved with running and athletics. It’s an easy access sport – it’s outdoor, and at its most basic level all you need is a pair of trainers.

I remember presenting at a conference once and I asked the delegates what their personal barriers to participation in running were. Their answers were pretty universal. Safe, well-lit routes. I responded by saying that the vast majority of them lived within 20 minutes of their local running track – a safe, well-lit venue with a consistent, forgiving surface!

We’ve got to get people over the hurdle of thinking track and field facilities are purely domains of the elite. They’re not. They are there for everyone. That’s not just about how we market, brand, and sell them. It’s also about how they look and feel and how we present them. For example, do tracks always need to be multi-lane 400m ovals? Can we look at new, and different ways of attracting more people? As an example, my local club is a safe, well-lit place to run. It’s got a 400m standard track but also an 800m cinder track running around the perimeter. This is a great alternative for a traditional track and a facility that’s heavily used by those starting out on their athletic journey.

Since TrackMark was introduced in 2018, we’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of track surface refurbishments, track repairs, and floodlighting repairs and upgrades. But, to take it to the next level, we felt it would be ideal to partner up with companies in each of these three key areas. We wanted and needed to find partners who shared our strategic view in terms of the importance of facilities and creating models of provision that are both inspiring and sustainable. Partners that could help us to educate, increase awareness, and unashamedly speed along our drive to achieve minimum standards across all venues. When you have a group of partners working in the same direction, you can pull ideas together and create ready-made solutions to support athletics facility operators and clubs.

It’s all about that shared vision and the synergy between us, and how as one we can move facilities forwards – old and new. Giving people easy access to that knowledge and information is vital in all walks of the business. These partnerships really help us connect with people. It’s helping venues feel safe in what they’re committing to. There’s a real feeling with them that ‘If England Athletics back this, it’s got to be okay.’. The way that our partners are working together, both to inform of opportunities and collectively provide solutions to problems has been brilliant.

Our overall goal is to create a network of local, accessible, sustainable, and inspiring facilities for every person in England. Wherever you live, you’ve always got a local place to go to. Not an ‘Olympic’ stadium necessarily – but somewhere to run, jump, and throw all year round. Lighting is integral to that.

Sustainability has to underpin every facility model. So, just jumping back to my role, some of what I do is making sure we have the right facilities in the right places, and for many areas a 400m track is not appropriate and/or sustainable. However, a synthetic, floodlit running loop around a playing field may provide a perfect solution for some local clubs and communities. Our ambition in the UK is that everyone is within a reasonable distance of some form of athletics facility. For that, as I’ve said, we need good lighting.

It’s got a hugely important role. One of the first questions I ask when working with a client on a new facility project is ‘Have you thought of your lighting?’. Firstly because it’s vital, and secondly because of the importance of gaining upfront planning consent.

The right floodlighting is absolutely essential. Sport England recognises this. We recognise this. If there’s no adequate lighting at, or planned for, a venue how can it function during the dark, winter months? How can you possibly continue and have a sustainable programme of athletics development if you only use it in the summer months? People want that safe, lit place throughout the year – including the winter. If there’s no lighting plan for a facility development, then it’s pretty much a nonstarter for us and Sport England too.

Aside from the whole sustainability requirement, good floodlighting also enhances the whole experience. Who doesn’t like sports under lighting – either as a competitor or spectator. I used to be an 800m runner and there was nothing like racing under lights at the end of an evening. It was always a special feeling.

Very important. There’s a mystique to lighting. Not enough people know a lot about it. They probably think that as long as the lights come on when they flick the switch everything must be working okay. But it’s important everyone knows about the minimum standards of things like uniformity and lux levels across a whole track and field.

The British Standards’ guidance and documents aren’t the easiest to read and understand. So, what we needed was to make things as simple as possible for operators and clubs. A single, straightforward guide that explained everything in a concise fashion that would help them understand the importance of good lighting in terms of safety and user experience. Something that would let them make their own, quick audit of their facilities easily. Our guide does exactly that. It was only brought out a couple of weeks ago and I’ve already had a lot of positive feedback from both venue operators and clubs. Even World Athletics asked me for a copy!

For me, this clearly shows that there’s an appetite for educational support like this. Anything we can do with you to educate and improve awareness of lighting has got to be a good thing. It’ll help to make sure that when venues are looking to build or improve their facilities, appropriate lighting is placed front and centre of the project because the venue will truly understand its importance.

Ask me again in six months. Seriously though, there was a lot of concern when the pandemic started and lockdown #1 began last March. I guess like many other sports we wondered what both the short-term and medium-term impact would be.

Fortunately, akin to other sports like golf and tennis, we were deemed a ‘safer’ sport and were released relatively early from lockdown early last summer. This meant we were able to put on 300 competitions last year, unlike a lot of other sports. Club-managed venues were absolutely at the forefront of this success. Although small in number, only 10% of athletics facilities are club managed, they were trailblazing in terms of getting the doors open and getting athletes running, jumping, and throwing again as soon as we came out of lockdown. I’m sure it’ll be the same again this summer as we hopefully approach something that resembles normality.

The challenge then, and now, is that the majority of track and field facilities are either local authority, leisure trust, educational, or commercially managed – with larger indoor facilities such as swimming pools and gyms. Throw in the fact that many leisure/sports venue staff remain on the Government’s furlough scheme and this creates a real air of uncertainty about when all athletics track venues will reopen.

We’ve done alright though compared to other sports like swimming who’ve been totally locked down for over a year. As a sport, we’ve tried really hard to engage with our members and those interested in running and athletics and throughout lockdown. For example, we’ve used the power of the digital age to run webinars and create content that encourages people to stay fit and active and enjoy the benefits of our great sport. I’m sure that when the summer finally comes that we will hit the ground running. There’s a real desire at clubs to get on with things again. To get training, events, and competitions going – even if it’s just at a local level to start with.

In terms of capital improvement work, you’d reasonably anticipate there being a downturn in work. But surprisingly, and really positively, this has not been the case. Indeed during the past 12-18 months, there’s been a significant uptick in capital improvement works. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that many venues have used these lockdown periods to take stock of their facilities and plan much-needed improvement work.

The Tokyo Olympics is one obviously, fingers crossed, and what it’ll do for the profile of athletics. Personally, I genuinely think though that the most exciting milestone for the majority of people will be that first club night. After over a year of not training or socialising with fellow club members, and coaches it’ll mean the world for so many people – athletes, coaches, and parents. It will for me, and I can’t wait.

I’ve been a keen runner since school. I started out in 800m and 1,500 and have gradually worked my way up to a marathon runner. In the 2000s I completed ten marathons, including London, Amsterdam, Dublin, and New York.

My marathon days are probably behind me now though. But never say never. If my son gets interested in running a marathon, then maybe just maybe I’ll run around with him. Although I’m sure it will be highly unlikely I can keep up with him. He’s six now and faster than me!