Sometimes things happen so quickly that you don’t have time to take stock- building the High Performance Programme (HPP) has certainly been one of those things, writes Hockey Mentors Founder Jack Childs.

130 junior performance players state school and/or ethnic minority from all around the country on a 2-day camp at one of the top private schools in the country feels normal these days. It isn’t.

These players will come from 94 clubs to take part in a 2-day camp at Clifton College in Bristol led by their Director of Hockey Olly Keenan, supported by a team of National League level coaches and players who have played junior/senior international hockey. The player base literally covers the whole of England. Players come from Yorkshire, Norwich, Cornwall and everything in between, as well as a few from Wales. What unites them all is two things. They are all players from state schools and/or ethnic minorities who have been selected onto the programme and they all want to improve their hockey.

I’m writing this on the Friday morning before a long 4 hour drive to Clifton College (Bristol) to oversee the second of our five 2026-27 HPP camps. It was an early start. The previous two days I had stayed at my parents, part-time house in the Cambridgeshire countryside and part-time unofficial ‘Hockey Mentors Warehouse’. There was lot of kit to sort not only for the HPP camp but also the upcoming World Youth Festival. I had a crazy 10 days coming up, with a 2-day camp in Bristol, followed by a training day in Burton Upon Trent and a 6-day tour to the Netherlands.

In the first year of Hockey Mentors we just did an online mentoring programme and 2×2-day events where people just turned up and played. No training, no coaching- just connection. It was clear from this first year that the players wanted much more. And it didn’t take Einstein to work out that to help hockey players to get better a dedicated training programme with focused coaching might help. This transitioned us from what was merely a passion project in the first year where I had not earnt a single penny into a coaching company with purpose.

And to be honest I had no clue what I was doing. As a junior player I had never been on a coaching companies camp and as an adult coach I had never coached on a coaching companies camp either. I just had one single idea and two advantages.

The single idea was that I wanted to help junior performance players from state schools and/or ethnic minority players fulfil their potential. Some might call that strategic USP; the truth was it was just luck. I did zero formal market research, I had no funding and definitely didn’t have a business plan. Sorry to burst any entrepreneurial bubbles but I just made it up as I went along with lots of passion, lots of support, lots of mistakes and sometimes just plain good old fashioned luck.

I did have two advantages though.

The first was I had the courage to put myself into very uncomfortable situations and TRUST- I learnt this from coaching University of Men’s 1s XI when I was only 20 and frankly miles out of my depth. Experiences like that build deep resilience in you. The second was I did have some good connections in hockey already- it does rather help if you want to build something. Admittedly I wasn’t born into those connections at my local comprehensive state school but alas they were there.

So we experimented.

We designed a 4 x2-day camp summer programme which had around 30-40 kids on each of them. The real JC came on board. Not me but the big man Jamie Cachia himself, a former Senior Scottish international and current Head of Women’s Performance hockey at Loughborough University. He loved the sound of what we were doing and wanted to get involved. Luckily for us we had stumbled upon one of the best coaches in the country and that made a huge difference to the buzz of the camps.

After that initial success the next month was a manic one of building a proper high-performance programme for the following year. The aim was to start taking the demand from the player network we were building more seriously and see if we could put a proper programme in place. I decided I was still not going to pay myself in this 2nd year, as I wanted to create a massive scholarship scheme for the players and give it the best chance of success.

The manic month was up there with the most intense of my life. I was working full-time for a social impact company in Sevenoaks, then using any spare time to put a 5 x 2-day camp high-performance programme together for the following year. It was 9am-5pm work and 5pm-9pm evenings on Hockey Mentors and then full weekends dedicated to Hockey Mentors. It was exhausting. Phone call after phone call to share with parents about what we were doing, booking pitches, getting coaches and so on. Although it was exhausting it was a different type. Not the lethargic bored heavy feeling, but more an outpouring of everything one can give to a bigger purpose. It was exhilarating and fun.

Eventually we got there. Vamos!

The first official HPP was born. Around 90 players from all over England paying different amounts depending on what they could afford- that first year we gave away a crazy £25,000 worth of scholarships. Although very noble sounding I learnt a hella lot of lessons in that first experience of building a bigger programme which I would then implement to make things more sustainable going forward, as one needs to balance everything financially so it is fair to all. Another blog post I think 😊

After that first high-performance programme in 2022-23 it has grown year on year to what it is now. This season we have 212 players on the HPP Programme from 152 clubs, who do between 3-5 of the 2-day camps across the August 2026-April 2027 cycle. These players all commit from May 2026 after open trials in April 2026, with large numbers of players unfortunately missing out as we seek to balance giving opportunities with ensuring we can still deliver quality. The camps will include a mixture of indoor and outdoor hockey, as well as off-pitch educational sessions.

The HPP now sits within a broader complimentary talent pathway that works alongside the England Hockey pathway to help state school and/or ethnic minority junior players have the best possible chance of entering elite pathways (i.e. junior international hockey).

And it all happened within 5 years from a simple idea to give state school and ethnic minority players a better chance. Through hard work, clear purpose and a little luck.