At 11:30 on Saturday St Helens Hockey Club hits a new milestone in its development when the ladies get underway in their first league fixture! After a few pandemic disrupted years and lots of hard work we welcome Formby 3s to Sutton Leisure as the 2022/23 ladies season gets underway.

It's a step into the unknown for many of the ladies having never played a game before, but after weeks and weeks of training and preparing the time has come for them to put what they've learnt into practice. We've got almost 25 ladies at the club currently, some of whom have been involved with the club for a number of years so their patience is about to finally pay off. We've also got a few of our juniors who have spent the last 12 months at our junior sessions on a Sunday who'll be involved this weekend and beyond so it's great to see their involvement.

It's an exciting time for everybody involved at the club, few would have imagined in 2015 when the club had just enough members to put out a single mens team, that within 10 years we'd see 2 mens teams playing regularly, a ladies section playing league hockey and over 50 club members involved - not to mention our juniors who are training week in week out. Our aim though is to continue this development and we'd like 2 more teams in place yet before we hit our 10 year anniversary, so lots of work to do and lots of room for more players to come down and give hockey a go.

On Saturday following the ladies game we've then got another first, the mens 1s and 2s take each other on in a competitive fixture for the first time.....that should be interesting and definitely worth staying on for if you're down to see the ladies in action.

Thank you to everybody involved, it promises to be a great day with all 3 teams in action at home and maybe a small celebratory drink, or two afterwards.