Guess who’s coming! :: Wessex Scene Online

Guess who’s coming!

13th October 2007
Simon Webb

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England Hockey have announced that Southampton University is to form a vital component of a partnership delivering the South Coast Performance Centre.

As part of England Hockey’s strategy to develop a more competitive team heading toward the London 2012 Olympic Games the organisation has decided to develop new regional performance centres.

The centre will enable England Hockey to deliver elite coaching to aspiring international hockey players and will capitilise upon the fact that most international hockey players developed a great deal while in tertiary education.

As well as the strong coaching the athletes shall be supported by unique strength and conditioning programmes and will ahve physiotheraply, lifestyle and medical support.

England experienced mixed fortunes at the most recent international tournament, the EuroNations Hockey Championships hosted in Manchester (see page 21 for full report) as the ladies performed very well throughout, taking the bronze medal and qualifying for the Olympics in Beijing 2008. The men however stuttered to a 5th place finish overall and will head to New Zealand to contest the final qualifying tournament for the 2008 games.

The partnership consiss of Southampton University, Solent University and Portsmouth University.

AU President Tom Page believes that Southampton and it’s partners were successful as they worked together rather than in competition to provide an excellent bid that provides facilities to athletes of all accademic ability and in Portsmouth access to Services based athletes through the excellent Navy Base facilities.

The announcement will have significant reprecussions for for Southampton University Hockey Club. As part of the initiative students will be encouraged to head to Southampton University to conduct thier studies and will likely represent the University in BUSA competition. However they will not contend Hampshire Saturday league fixtures as they are asked to continue playing for thier current clubs.

The University club hopes to ammend this situation by taking a more professional appraoch to the Saturday league games and within a few years hope to compete at a standard whereby students with aspirations to represent England may play for the University at an appropriate level.

Former World Number One goal keeper, Dave Staniforth, coaches Southampton and has instigated many changes to the club such as Multi Stage Fitness Tests used to qualify for teams and has changed the structure and purpose of training sessions beyond recognition.

These are exiting times indeed for Southampton and hockey in the South of England.