About Us
Welcome to Wimbledon Hockey Club
Wimbledon are a large, inclusive and high performing hockey club...
LARGE
Wimbledon Hockey club is one of the largest hockey clubs in the UK with 850 juniors and 15 Adult teams.
INCLUSIVE
Players of all standards are welcome. We also outreach beyond our membership into the community to provide the opportunity for young people to play and develop through hockey . We have engaged with over 6,000 children and have worked with over half the state primary schools in the London Borough of Merton including many schools in disadvantaged areas.
HIGH PERFORMING
With over 20 Olympians and International players, Wimbledon are one of the top performing clubs in the UK. Both the Men’s and Women’s 1st teams play in the National Premiership and the Women’s 2nd team play one league below in the South National League. In 2017, Wimbledon’s Men were the first UK team in 7 years to reach the final 4 of the coveted European Championships.
More and more juniors are aspiring to follow the high performing elite senior players with 76 young players in the 2020 / 21 season making selection for County, Region or the England International junior squads.
Our History
Wimbledon Hockey Club is one of the oldest hockey clubs in the world, having been founded in 1883, and indeed it was ‘the Wimbledon Rules’ that were adopted as the first ever universally accepted Rules of Hockey. Originally playing on the edge of Wimbledon Common, the Club moved to its present site, as tenants of The Wimbledon Cricket Club at the end of the 19th century and have been based in Church Road ever since then. In 1889 female relatives of the male players decided they too wished to play hockey and thus was founded The Wimbledon Ladies HC, now the oldest ladies hockey club in the world. The Ladies led a more peripatetic existence for their first 100 years, but are now firmly ensconced in Church Road and amalgamated with their male counterparts as ’ Wimbledon Hockey Club’, in turn a section of the multi-sport Wimbledon Club.
Our club house on Church Road is considered to be one of the best in the land, providing a much more luxurious environment than in the early days playing on the common...there were no changing rooms and players simply took off their jackets to play. To determine sides, the local outfitters provided caps in the only two distinctive colours they had; pink and maroon. A dozen caps of each colour were bought and handed out at the beginning of each game to differentiate the two teams. Ever since, pink and maroon have been our main club colours.
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In the 1890s it was not unusual to have a crowd of several hundred watching and all matches were fully reported in the national press. Since those halcyon days, crowds dwindled for many moons until recent years when the standard of hockey has rocketed and the crowds have growing once again into the hundreds. Although Wimbledon have had numerous international players dating back to the early 1900’s, it has not been until the 2010’s that Wimbledon has been able to boast a large array of world-class talent including Olympic gold medalists; Alex Danson-Bennett (MBE) and Crista Cullen (MBE) as well as over 20 International and Olympic players from Great Britain and around the world.
In 2017, we started providing coaches to support the wider community and help young people become more active. We have since engaged with 6,000 children and have worked with over half of the state primary schools in the London Borough of Merton through the Quick Start Hockey charity.
As of 2020, we are one of only two clubs with three teams playing in the top two tiers of the English national league (Men’s 1s, Women’s 1s and Women's 2s) and in 2017, were the first British club in 7 years to reach the final 4 of the coveted European Championships. With 15 adult teams and over 800 juniors Wimbledon is one of the largest and most successful clubs in English Hockey, offering high-performance, club and community hockey to players from 4 years to much older!
