Hockey: Saved from brink Prescot strike back with top club title

Apr 18 2008 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

THESE are good times at Prescot Hockey Club. Membership is increasing, junior development plans are bearing fruit and the club’s overall strategy is directed by a dynamic committee which pursues a determinedly ‘can do’ philosophy.

Last autumn the accolade of Club of the Year was bestowed on a trio of boisterous and delighted Prescot HC members at the Merseyside Sporting Champions Dinner.

But if officials had wilted a few years ago when a local authority Jeremiah suggested to chairman Dave Johnson that the club should move to Kirkby and be renamed Knowsley HC, the institution which flourishes today would have been little but a fond memory.

The possibility of relocation was floated because of a plan to knock down the Prescot Leisure Centre where the club is based. In the event, it was the plan that was demolished, not the facility. Nowadays, Johnson is keen to stress, the club’s relationship with the authority could scarcely be more cordial.

“We have a fantastic level of understanding with Knowsley,” said the TV producer currently in his second spell as chairman. “The local authority has helped us with funding and also with our thriving school development programme that extends into St Helens. Officials are completely on-side as regards our club.”

But the problem over where the club was to play is only one of a number of challenges which Prescot has overcome in recent years. Johnson admits that in certain areas of Merseyside hockey is seen as a “middle-class sport for girls”, an implied affront which may outrage the ladies rather more than the bourgeoisie, and it is plain that the club’s current healthy state has been forged in the fires of previous crises.

“In 1998-9 we only had players for two and a half teams,” he recalled. “So we had to attract members and let the club grow gradually. Then in 2002 our astroturf pitch was like concrete, we possessed just 17 hockey balls and only the first team had kit.”

Johnson and his “strong committee” have met such problems with the sort of fortitude and initiative from which other sports clubs currently in the doldrums might take inspiration.

The results are impressive. Prescot HC is currently thriving, with 120 playing members, a minibus for travelling to away games and the funding in place for a swish electronic ball feeder used for penalty corner practice. Johnson stresses the collaborative nature of the achievement, and also the club’s distinctive attitude towards their sport.

“It’s not all about me,” he insisted. “We try to find something for all members to do and we also try to put into practice the ideals of the Olympic founder, Pierre de Coubertin. Winning is not the be-all and end-all for us. On the pitch we have some competitive characters and we play with an edge.

“But while it’s great when we win, it’s still okay when we lose. You don’t have to cheat in order to enjoy amateur sport.”

And that mention of the Olympics carries a special resonance for Prescot members. Prior to their 1988 gold medal triumph in Seoul the Great Britain Olympic squad trained at the club, and back in January, Cannock’s Matt Taylor, a current international, coached the elite men’s and ladies’ squad.

“It’s the sort of thing we do,” said the quietly ambitious Johnson. “It’s like Wayne Rooney coaching Prescot Cables.”

But for the members of a club founded 50 years ago when workers at the BICC factory became – perish the heresy – tired of football, the arrival of the Great Britain player was further confirmation that they were doing things right.