By Adel Holtzhausen
Captain of Alpha Sports Hautapu women’s hockey team
Who remembers the days when you had to wake up early in the cold winter mornings to attend your favourite sport in school?
Hyping yourself up, barely sleeping the night before, riddled with excitement every moment before the game.
Those were the days …
Well, for us at Hautapu Sports Club, it still is!
Main photo: Members of the Alpha Sports Hautapu Sports Women get ready for game time.
Welcome to the first year of senior hockey for Hautapu Sports Club.
What a privilege it’s been to be part of the foundation that forms senior hockey at Hautapu Sports Club.
This is just the start of the journey, and although it has proven challenging at times, we have come together as a team to support and build on the sport we love.
It started as an idea to support the need for a local team and the progression for our junior and intermediate superstars to have a sports team to join once they leave school.
Naturally, with most of us having a love for hockey, we could not sit on the sidelines and let the younger people have all the fun.
What started as a conversation about longing to play hockey again led to two senior teams at Hautapu Sports Club.
And so, Hautapu Sports senior hockey was born.
Local businesses sponsor our two teams, and that led to the men’s team becoming Hidden Lake Hotel Hautapu Sports Men and the women’s team becoming Alpha Sports Hautapu Sports Women.
We have amazing players, of all ages and skill levels. We have high school kids, university students and adults of all ages including mums, dads and even grandparents stepping on the turf each Sunday.
We have players who have never played hockey before but wanted to give it a try, players who continued to play after school, happy to feed into a local team.
We also have players who haven’t played in a number of years, with one player having to dust off their stick for the first time in 39 years. It is amazing to see the players, all unique in their own way, come together like this.
Needless to say, the love we all share for the sport has been the driving factor and you can see it in the passion that everyone puts into each training and each game.
We have weekly training sessions, building each other and finding new ways to upskill our game plan.
We have matches every Sunday against other clubs in Hamilton and the surrounding areas.
The season is built on three rounds for about 21 weeks.
The first two rounds are the decider for the top team to move up a division or for the last team to move down a division.
The last round is known as the Championship round.
While both our teams did not make the cut for moving up a division, our teams have thrived in the first two rounds.
The first round was about finding our feet, getting to know each other and relearning our own skills, which meant a lot of growth and learning from mistakes.
Both Hidden Lake Hotel Hautapu Sports Men and Alpha Sports Hautapu Sports played semi finals in the second round, unfortunately, missing due to ranking, with both games ending in a draw.
The Championship round has almost finished, both our teams won their semi finals convincingly last week, and play in finals this coming Sunday.
Both games are on turf 1 at Gallagher Hockey centre at Innes Common, the men play at 9am and the women at 10.30am.
But that is not where it ends for Hautapu Sports senior hockey … We hope to keep up with training sessions and add a few more social and local games to the list.
For us, at least, it wasn’t about moving up a division this year.
We needed to build the plane as we flew (which can probably be our motto) and we faced many obstacles on the runway.
Despite all of this, we had so much fun on the way.
We hosted a quiz night to fundraise for Hautapu Sports senior hockey. Not only did we raise a whopping $11,000, we had the opportunity to present ourselves to our supporting community for the first time and build on that network that we hope will support us for many years to come.
This quiz night will become an annual event.
While we are still on the hunt for a ‘home’ turf, we make the most of what we have within the community and we are grateful for all the support given to us on this journey.
Now that we have the foundation for Hautapu Sport senior hockey sorted, we are looking forward to build on that in the coming seasons, making this a great club sport for anyone to join.
Not only do we get to enjoy the sport, but we meet awesome people from all walks of life and build great friendships from our joint love for hockey.
Bring on 2025!
How to join us
If you know of someone or want to join hockey yourself, feel free to email us at hautapuhockey@gmail.com.
If you want to join our list of sponsors, please get in contact with Marie Dale or Mike Fredrickson at the above email.
We hope to have many Hautapu supporters at our finals this week; come along, make some noise and celebrate what we have achieved this season.
Our grand finals
Games to be played on Sunday August 25, 2024
Men’s reserve 4
Grand final
Hautapua Sports v Te Awamutu
Gallagher Hockey Centre, New World Te Rapa Turf 1, 9am
Women’s reserve 3
Grand final
Culswick Wanderers v Hautapu Sports
Gallagher Hockey Centre, New World Te Rapa Turf 1, 10.30am
How to get there
What’s happening at your club
