Firstly as captain I would like to thank all those who have umpired for us this season, even if on the day you have been given a hard time in anyway, you are appreciated and without you it would not be possible for the games to go ahead. Special thanks have to go to Merv who on a couple of occasions this season has given up playing to umpire for the Men’s 1’s.

A few other votes of thanks go to Alex for sorting out the umpires each week, generally a thankless task which takes up a lot of time behind the scenes week in week out. To Ian for arranging all the fixtures before the season started, to Ruth for booking everything from pitches to teas and kit to end of season bashes. Finally to Graham who pretty much no matter what the weather would be out in his shorts taking photo’s and then ensuring that we are in the wider community building our wider profile as a club.

This season has been a very positive one for us, this has largely been down to Adrian Palmer returning to Redbridge and Ilford to take on the role as player coach, at the start of the season we spoke at length with Adrian, Matt, Alex and myself about what we wanted to achieve and I believe that we have pretty much achieved those aims. We are playing better more complete hockey winning games that in the last few years we would have lost.

We have had a couple of new players this year who have either returned to Redbridge after playing at other clubs or have come to join our revival, Taz has come back from Fords, Kulraj and Harps (or Dopey as my youngest has decided he should be called) have come to join us following the unfortunate demise of Ramgahria, Mike and Dylan have been poached from Old Loughts and Sean back from Waltham Forest before disappearing off to New York. Plus the old guard of JP, Elliot, Marc, Alex, Josh, Jake (before he went off to meet royalty on some little Island somewhere), Aneel, Andy, Konrad, and myself. We also had guest appearances from Sunny, Smylie, Ian, Tom, Aaron, Matt and Neil.

In general we have had some very positive results in both league and cup games we have played in the HA vase and enjoyed beating both the winners of our own league and the winners of 3SW as well as Berkswell and Balsall Common up in Coventry, unfortunately our cup run was halted by a very well organised team from Crawley Hockey Club in the semi-final.

We finished 3rd in our league, Div 3SE to Southend, who we beat 3 times in all competitions throughout the year and Wapping 3’s who unfortunately beat us twice. So we missed out on promotion by a one place, but thankfully promotion this year was not our main aim, it would have been nice though!

Our plans for next year are to hit the ground running we will be meeting shortly to discuss what everyone’s aims are for the 2015/16 season and from all the noises I have heard the main aim is to keep the team together and to build on the improvements we have made this year and if that all comes together to win promotion to Div 2S. But in order to achieve this goal we have a lot of hard work to do between now and the end of next season.

Finally our player of the season for 2014/15, this player was voted for by the team as a whole and as a result was a pretty close run thing between a number of players, special mention should go to Josh and Marc who came a very close joint second.

The Men’s 1’s player of the season has taken on the responsibility of developing the skills of individual and imparting his experience to put the team in a much stronger position. He has also lead by example with his work rate on the pitch and has been a major contributing factor to the success of the team this season. The Men’s 1st team player of the year is Adrian Palmer.