Newcastle upon Tyne, 27th of September 2023 After not holding an Annual General Meeting for two years due to COVID-19 pandemic, the key committee members brought the entire club together. The head coach, Keith Sowden, summarised: “It has been a long season with a lot of work put in by all teams.” Overall, the club […]
Brief History of Club
In early 2000’s, several male players were travelling to Darlington and Middlesbrough to play National League volleyball. They were getting disillusioned with this, along with the fact that they were getting older, had families of their own with nowhere to take their children to introduce them to the sport.
The result was that in 2005 a group of ex Gateshead men and a Newcastle City female who used to play in the National League, got together and decided that the only thing to do was to form a new volleyball club. This was with the aim of enabling the National League players from the Tyneside area to play in their own region and for juniors to learn and compete within their own age group. The intention was also to start a women’s National League team as soon as we had enough potential players.
We contacted numerous sports centres and schools in Newcastle but received just 2 replies: Sacred Heart School and Newburn Activity Centre. The school did not have the facilities for NL and so Newburn became the base for our club.
We started with a National League men’s team and entered Volleyball England NL in season 2005/6. The team were relatively successful reaching Division 2 and as we had a group of juniors between us; children, relatives and neighbours, it was decided to enter teams into the Local Leagues too.
Newburn Volleyball Club was born with the NL team being called Newcastle City. Newburn survived and we are now in our 13th year.
In 2019, after lots of meetings, forming a new club committee and lots and lots of discussion, we finally moved into the newly built Newcastle Eagles Arena on Tuesday 8th January 2019. This was a huge move and decision for the club but one we were prepared and excited to take.
We currently have 6 teams playing in the local leagues; 2, men’s in Division 1, 1 junior mens/boys in Division 2, 2, womens teams in the Womens league, as well as 2 junior girls teams playing friendlies against 2 other clubs. We run 4 sessions each Tuesday evening and 2 beginner sessions most Sundays. There has been a huge uptake of our sport country wide, due mainly to a Netflix cartoon Haikyu!
At the moment we have a head coach who is Level 2 qualified and is registered with Volleyball England.
We also have an assistant coach who is L3 qualified and registered with Volleyball England. We then have several unqualified members who assist with training.
