An Open Letter to the Committees of Sheffield Ice Hockey Academy

Every organisation takes its character from the people who lead it, and Sheffield Ice Hockey Academy is no exception. Here, an extraordinary amount of power sits in very few hands — and at the very top, governance and coaching authority sit within a single household, with the Chair of the Academy on one side and the head coach on the other. Whatever the intentions of the individuals involved, that structure should alarm anyone who understands how organisations are supposed to work. When the person who runs the committee and the person who runs the ice answer to no one but each other, there is no independent oversight left. There is no meaningful appeal. There is nowhere for a concern to go that does not lead straight back to the people it concerns.

And responsibility does not dissolve as it moves down the ladder. Here, decisions have a habit of being carried out several steps removed from the people they serve — communicated by others, enforced by others, deniable by everyone. But nobody at the top of an organisation gets to remain whiter than white simply because their own fingerprints never touch the paperwork. Culture is set by what leadership rewards, what it tolerates, and what it quietly encourages. The people who carry out the decisions know whose decisions they are carrying out. So does everyone watching from the benches.

Then consider what happens when somebody actually tries to approach them. There is no open door. There is no forum where a parent can put a straight question and expect a straight answer. Emails go unanswered for weeks, or come back in a tone that makes very clear the question should never have been asked. Raise something face to face and families describe being talked over, walked away from, or met with plain aggression — sent away feeling that they, rather than the decision, were the problem. A committee that cannot be approached cannot be held to account, and a committee that is never held to account stops governing for the children and starts governing for itself. That is precisely what parents here believe has happened. Decisions are taken behind closed doors by people with something to gain from them, defended by people who will not explain them, and reviewed by nobody at all.

Sheffield Ice Hockey Academy has a nepotism problem. Selection and opportunity too often follow relationships rather than merit. The children of committee members and coaches seem to find doors opening that stay firmly shut for others. Friends look after friends. Favours are remembered and returned. Opportunities — team places, tournament spots, development pathways — circulate within a familiar inner circle while children outside it wait for chances that never quite arrive. It operates, in plain terms, like an old boys' club: not written down anywhere, never acknowledged, but visible to anyone who watches long enough. Ask around the car park at IceSheffield and you will not struggle to find parents who describe exactly the same pattern. Most will only say it quietly. That is the next problem.

And it does not stop at opportunity. Junior hockey is punishingly expensive. Families pay subscriptions, ice fees, tournament costs, kit and fuel, month after month, and plenty of them go without elsewhere to keep their child skating. Meanwhile parents describe committee members whose own children appear to pay nothing at all — fees waived, costs absorbed, invoices that never seem to arrive, while everybody else's arrive on time and are chased when they are late. Those same children are then found in the top spots: the top team, the first line, the tournament squad, the places every child in the club is supposedly competing for. If those arrangements are legitimate, publish them. Show the families who fund this Academy which fees are waived, on what basis, and who signed them off. Nobody is asking to see anyone's bank statement. They are asking why the people who set the fees appear to be the only ones not paying them, and why their children are so consistently at the front of the queue.

Then there are the awards. Families have sat and watched committee members and coaches hand trophies to their own children — involved in the nomination, the vote, the presentation, sometimes all three, without so much as stepping out of the room. Perhaps those children deserved to win. Some of them are excellent players and none of this is their fault. That is exactly the problem: nobody can ever know, because the people choosing the winner had their own child in the running. It cheapens the award for the child who receives it and it insults every other child in that room, left to work out whether they were beaten on merit or simply born into the wrong family. In any other organisation this is a routine conflict of interest, settled in thirty seconds by the person concerned handing the decision to somebody else. Presenting your own child with the trophy in front of everyone else's is not an administrative oversight. It is classless.

Now look at it from where a child is standing. There are children at this Academy who were given a special coaches' award — the award that exists precisely to recognise the player who works hardest, listens, lifts everyone around them and never complains — and who were then cast aside not long afterwards by the very people who gave it to them. No conversation. No plan. No explanation. Simply gone from a group they had been held up in front of, weeks earlier, as the example everyone else should follow. Both of those things cannot be true at once. Either the award meant what it said, in which case that child deserved a great deal better than what followed; or it meant nothing, in which case it was a trinket handed over to keep a family quiet while the real decision had already been taken. Parents have had to sit at home and explain that contradiction to a child still holding the trophy. Nobody who created it has ever had to explain it to anybody.

Then there is the way the news is delivered. Families have opened rejection emails while their child was away playing in a tournament — mid-weekend, between games, the child still in kit and still emptying themselves for a badge that had already decided it was finished with them. A parent reads it on a phone in a cold corridor, puts the phone away, walks back in and applauds. Whether that timing was deliberate or merely careless makes no difference whatsoever to the child on the end of it. Anyone with the faintest feel for children knows that you wait until the tournament is over. It costs nothing to wait until Monday. That it did not occur to anyone to wait tells you exactly how much thought is given to the child on the other side of the send button.

And when families ask why — as they are perfectly entitled to — they are met with silence, or a single sentence that explains nothing. No criteria. No comparison. Nothing a child can work on and come back stronger for. Children are far tougher than adults give them credit for, and a decision they can understand is a decision they can take. What damages them is a decision nobody will explain, delivered at the worst possible moment, by adults who were applauding them a few weeks before.

Every junior organisation worth the name has a pathway — the route by which a child moves from turning up, to developing, to representing, to going as far as their ability will carry them. The Academy talks about its pathway often, and holds it out to every family as the reason for all the early mornings and all the invoices. But watch who actually travels along it. The same handful of children move smoothly from squad to squad and opportunity to opportunity, as though the way had been cleared before they arrived — and they are, with remarkable consistency, the children of the inner circle. For everyone else, the pathway is something you orbit. Close enough to see it. Close enough to fill the sessions, make up the numbers and pay the fees that keep it running. Never quite close enough to be let onto it. And a child who orbits long enough is not left orbiting forever — sooner or later they are pushed to the side altogether, to make room for the next name on a list nobody outside the room has ever seen.

Nobody can tell you how a child gets onto the pathway, because nothing about it is written down. No entry criteria. No selection process a parent can read. No feedback a child could use to understand where they fall short and come back stronger. Access is decided privately, by the same few people this letter keeps returning to — and that discretion is exactly what makes the pathway so useful to them, because a pathway with no published rules is not a development tool. It is leverage. Families understand, without ever being told, that their child's progress depends less on what happens on the ice than on their own standing with the people who control the gate. Stay agreeable and doors may open. Ask a question and watch the pathway quietly curve away from your child. In a properly run organisation, the pathway follows the player. Here, parents will tell you, it follows the parents.

There is a simple test, and the committees are welcome to take it. Publish the pathway. Set out what it is, what the entry criteria are, who decides, and how a family gets honest feedback along the way — and let selections be made by people with no family stake in the outcome. If every child on the pathway today is there on merit, publication costs nothing and vindicates everyone, the children above all. If the criteria cannot be written down, or the decisions could not survive being explained, then everyone will finally know what parents have long suspected: this is not a pathway at all. It is a guest list.

Now follow the money. Every family at this Academy knows exactly what goes in, because it leaves their own account every month: subscriptions, ice fees, tournament costs, kit, travel — thousands of pounds a year, per child, much of it found by families who go without other things to find it. Ask what happens to it after that and the picture goes carefully blurry. Costs are published, and the Academy points to that as transparency. It is not. A list of what things cost tells a family nothing about what came in, what was spent on what, which fees were waived and for whom, or which roles are paid and at what level. Partial disclosure is the most useful kind there is, because it buys the appearance of openness while leaving every question that actually matters unanswerable. Full accounts are never laid in front of the membership. And presiding over all of it is the same single household this letter began with — the Chair on one side, the head coach on the other. The fees are set under their authority, collected under their authority, spent under their authority, and reviewed by nobody at all. The same two people sit on every side of every financial decision the club makes. Let it be said plainly: this letter accuses nobody of dishonesty. It does not need to. The entire point of published accounts is that families should never have to take the honesty of the people handling their money on trust — the accounts do that work. Here, trust is the only thing on offer, and it has run out.

Then there is the payroll. Families understand that some roles in a modern club are paid, and few would begrudge it — good coaching is worth paying for, and plenty of clubs pay for it. What no family here can tell you is which roles are paid, what they cost, who approved them, or how the people holding them are ever assessed. In any properly run organisation, payment and accountability arrive together: somebody independent sets the terms, reviews the performance, and can — if it comes to it — say no. Here, the money went onto the payroll and the accountability never followed it. The people drawing an income from the club answer to the committee; the committee answers to nobody; and the household at the centre of it sits on both sides of every one of those arrangements. Nobody paid out of other families' subscriptions should be marking their own homework — and nobody approving that pay should share a front door with the person receiving it.

And behind all of it is supposed to stand the constitution — because a community club is not a private company. It belongs to its members, and its constitution exists to make that ownership real. There is an annual general meeting, and the committees will point to it, as though holding one settles the question. It does not. A general meeting is not a formality to be got through; it is the one occasion in the year when the people who fund the club examine what has been done with their money and, if they choose, change the people doing it. What parents describe is something else entirely: a meeting where decisions already taken are explained and defended, where the figures put in front of the room are the ones that support the case being made, and where anything awkward meets the same closing of ranks it meets the rest of the year. An AGM that exists to justify the committee to the membership has the whole thing the wrong way round. So the test is not whether a meeting took place. It is this: circulate the full accounts before it, take questions nobody has pre-selected, and put the officers up for an election the membership could actually win. Do those three things and this section disappears. Refuse them, and the meeting is not governance. It is theatre, with minutes.

So set the accounts aside for a moment and look at what families receive in return. Around £115 a month, per child, buys a single team session a week and a skills session once a fortnight. That is it. There is no off-ice programme. There is no strength and conditioning, no classroom work, no video, no game understanding, no session where a child sits down and is taught the sport they are paying to play. There is no published curriculum setting out what a child at this age group is supposed to learn this season, and no progression framework by which anyone could tell whether they have learned it. Ask what your child is working on this term and there is no document to hand you, because there isn't one. Families here are paying a development fee for a development programme nobody can produce. Other junior organisations at this level publish exactly these things as a matter of course, and they do it because parents handing over that kind of money every month are entitled to know what it is for.

And the fortnightly skills session — held up as the development half of the offer — is, in the flat words of parents who pay for it, abysmal. Children of wildly different ages and stages are put on the ice together, so the session is pitched at nobody: too basic to stretch the older ones, too advanced for the small ones trying to keep up, with far too many bodies and far too few coaches to fix that for any of them. Half an hour of shuffling in a queue is not skills coaching. It is supervision, billed as development. Whatever else is wrong at this Academy, this is the part that touches every single child who skates here, including the ones inside the circle — because a child cannot be developed by a programme that has never been written down.

Then there is the silence that comes with it. No reports. No reviews. No assessments. In a season, a family can receive not one word about how their child is progressing, what they are good at, what they need to work on, or where they stand — and neither, more importantly, can the child. Parents are not partners in their child's development here; they are simply the account the fees come out of. Pay up, and be quiet. That is the arrangement, and every family at this rink recognises it. So here is another test the committees are welcome to take, and it costs nothing at all: publish the curriculum for each age group, publish the session plans and the coach-to-player ratios, publish what a child is expected to be able to do by the end of the season — and give every child two honest written reviews a year. If all of that already exists, publishing it takes an afternoon and settles this section for good. If it does not exist, then the fee is not buying development. It is buying ice time, and calling it something else.

This is not only a parents' complaint, and the committees should be clear about that before they file it as one. Coaches — people inside the game, who give up their evenings and their weekends for it — are as disgusted by what they are watching as anyone in the stands. They see decisions taken that have nothing whatever to do with progressing ice hockey in this city: squads shaped around relationships rather than ability, opportunities steered towards the right families, outcomes plainly settled before any meeting takes place, and children moved on for who their parents are rather than how they play. A committee exists to grow the game and to serve the children playing it. Coaches will tell you, quietly, that this one exists to serve itself.

Some of them have said so out loud, and paid for it. Others have stopped saying it, because they have seen what happens to those who do — and a coach who loses their position also loses the players they have spent years building something with. So they carry out decisions they believe are wrong, keep their real views for the car park, and hope somebody else forces the change. When the volunteers running your sessions no longer believe the organisation above them is acting in good faith, that is not a difference of opinion to be managed. It is a governing body that has lost the people it depends on entirely.

Because at this Academy, it is not OK to speak up. It is not OK to report a problem. Families here have learned that raising a concern through the proper channels does not get the concern addressed — it gets the family marked. Speak up and you are ostracised. Not officially, of course. Nothing is ever put in writing. There is no meeting, no explanation, no decision anyone will put their name to. It happens silently. The conversations get shorter. The invitations stop. The ice time thins out. A child who was part of everything is suddenly, quietly, part of nothing — and the parents are left to piece together what happened, knowing exactly what happened, and knowing they can never prove it. That is the genius of it. Silent removal leaves no fingerprints.

We have watched families singled out for nothing more than asking a reasonable question. We have watched others swallow serious concerns whole rather than risk it, because they have seen what happens to the ones who don't. Think about what that means in an environment full of children. Every safeguarding framework in British sport is built on one foundation: that people feel safe to report problems. A culture where reporting a concern reliably leads to exclusion is not just unfair — it is a safeguarding failure by definition, because it guarantees that the next serious problem, whatever it turns out to be, will go unreported too. The committees reading this should sit with that sentence for a while.

Here is what the people making these decisions need to understand. None of it matters to the children. They don't know. They cannot see the politics, the alliances, or the quiet arrangements between adults. All they know is the ice under their skates and the game they love — and they will become the best players they can possibly be, with or without your blessing.

Because here is the thing about shutting children out: you don't extinguish the fire. You feed it.

You might laugh now at what you have done. But one day, in the not-so-distant future, those children will be the ones laughing. Every overlooked trial, every unexplained decision, every door quietly closed has given them something no committee can select for and no favouritism can buy: drive and tenacity. They will carry it forward with teams that care about them, that see their potential, and that judge them on nothing but their edges, their effort, and their attitude. And when they get where they are going, everyone will know they earned every inch of it themselves — which is more than some will ever be able to say.