Hockey mum’s club goal

SLIP on some shin guards and pull up your socks - Blacktown is about to get a new hockey club.

Fed up with there being no local facilities for the “great game”, Kings Langley mother of three Lyn O’Reilly has taken on the job of creating a junior club.

As of next year, she hopes the Kings Langley Hockey Club will run a beginners’ squad of boys and girls aged 7 to 12, who will train and play at Pearce Reserve, as well as enter an under-11, under-13 and possibly an under-15 team in the north area competition.

Mrs O’Reilly said the reason behind the push was to offer local children an alternative to contact sports, such as rugby league, which dominate winter.

To teach her sons, now aged nine to 13, how to play hockey she made sticks out of newspaper. She said they loved it, but because there was no local club they have been “travelling” ever since.

“I thought it would be easy to find a club but it wasn’t,” she said.

After training the Kings Langley Public teams this year, Mrs O’Reilly said she hated seeing the children’s disappointment when they realised the closest fields weren’t close at all.

“They say, ‘It’s too too far, we’ll stick to local sport’,” she said.

The Rooty Hill RSL teams play in the Penrith competition out of Kingswood and although the Baulkham Hills Association sounds close, Mrs O’Reilly said they train and play at Pennant Hills Park, so most nights her boys don’t get home until 10pm.

“I’m very keen to run a club that’s family friendly, with family friendly times and a location that’s accessible,” she said. “The ultimate goal would be a Blacktown association.”

If the sport takes off, the council would give consideration to constructing some synthetic fields in the area, a spokeswoman said.

She estimated the cost of a new field at a minimum of $2 million.

Although $65 million was allocated to a number of sports over the last few years, she said there were no requests to fund hockey fields or clubs.

Because the club management consists of just three mums and a dad, Mrs O’Reilly said they were in desperate need of financial support to supply uniforms, equipment and cover booking fees.

* Anyone interested in sponsoring the club can contact Lyn O’Reilly on 9674 2876 or email .