About Us

Hockey in Harrogate since 1913.

The earliest trace of us is a fixture card and a silver-plated water jug — a 1914 wedding present from Harrogate Athenian Ladies H.C., returned to the club by the family of the bride and now sitting in the cabinet behind the bar. The men's club was re-formed in 1949 after an advert in the Harrogate Advertiser drew a handful of players to a meeting at the Victoria Hotel. The ladies followed in 1953, playing an entire first season away from home because there was nowhere to host a game.

What came next was forty years of looking for a decent pitch. We played on The Stray, on a sloping field at Knaresborough with an earth toilet and one cold tap, on shale and tarmac at the Army Apprentice College, and on a waterlogged strip behind Railway Athletic that members tolerated chiefly for the company in the Dripping Dagger afterwards. In 1970 we converted a derelict stable block into a clubhouse for £1,200. In 1971 we ran the first Crawfurd-Porter Tournament — it's still going, 55 years on.

The wait ended in 1999. Granby Hockey Centre gave us a purpose-built clubhouse, changing rooms, a function room and our own floodlit pitch, funded largely by a National Lottery grant. We own it outright, which very few clubs can say, and the bar looks directly out over the pitch — useful in February.

Today we're one of the five largest hockey clubs in Yorkshire, with over 500 members.

Four men's teams play from North East Premier Division down to Moor & Dale, alongside a veterans side competing in cups across the North. Six ladies teams run from North East Premier through the Yorkshire and Dale leagues. Our Masters sides — ladies over 35s and 45s, men's over 55s — enter the England Hockey National Cups each year, and in 2023/24 the Ladies O45s reached a Tier 1 semi-final.

More than 200 of our members are juniors, from age six upwards, boys and girls, beginners through to county and national level. The section is run almost entirely by volunteers, and a steady flow of those players come up into the senior squads every season.

If you haven't held a stick in twenty years, or ever, Back to Hockey runs every Monday night. It's informal, it's social, and nobody will ask you to remember the rules.

Everyone is welcome. Come down and find out.