Dragons Info: Alumni Game and Award Ceremony

You may have noticed that we missed our player spotlight last week on Seamus Nangle.  As we’re still regrowing our team, most of our administrative work is done by a very small group of players and Trustees who are also full-time students, full-time employed, or both!  It’s also one of the reasons why we’re trying to build up an endowment and fundraise, so we can eventually get to a place where we can sustainably operate with the tools and staff we would have had with support from our university.

You’ll also notice that today’s post is not a Player Spotlight (we’ll get back to Seamus later this week, he had a crazy 7 point game this weekend against Southampton, beating his buddy Rohan Kingwellby a point). Every now and then we’ll post an information article or a fun article from our archives, we’ve got some brewing about the origins of the Dragons and our Logo. This week we’re highlighting our Alumni Game and our (informal) Awards Ceremony!

In case you missed it in our Dragons WhatsApp Community Alumni Chat and Announcements (it’s also included in the Group Information Page) or in our December and January Newsletters (please fill out our Alumni Contact Form if you’d like to be included in either of these), we’re having our Annual Alumni Game at Lee Valley Ice Centre at 8:00pm on March 21st!

Many of you know that we have sporadically provided alumni events over the last few decades and in recent years this has been in the form of various tournaments (including the BUIHA Alumni Tournament and the Amsterdam Alumni Tournament) as well as our own Alumni Game at Lee Valley when it was possible. We also had events like the last practice before the closing of Lee Valley during the COVID Lockdowns (what a wild time that was).

Now that we’re fully set up and have a bit more stability for the team we’re trying to establish a little bit of normalcy for the club.  One of the silver linings of the University of London Student Union closing down is that as independent charities we are able to provide more opportunities, more accessibility, and better continuity from year to year. Gone are the days of split fees and tiers for Full and Associate Students. Many of you will remember the frustrations of being a passionate part of the Dragons only to learn that you couldn’t be an official part of the Committee because you were an Associate Member. Over the years this often led to gaps in Committee positions and continuity where information was lost or not maintained. It also means no more red tape from UoL in sorting out events and planning for the future.

Although we had our wonderful champion, Angela Jelfs, to help guide us from year to year, their duties reached far beyond the Dragons to 37 other sports, clubs, and societies.  Now, in their place is our Board of Trustees who are all former Dragons and all passionate alumni who want to see the team survive and thrive.  This will help us provide the structure and continuity needed for the team to redevelop a student committee that can begin to run the day-to-day operations of the club. And, as we mentioned earlier, it will allow us to provide more stable plans for the future.

Now, back to the Alumni Game.  Starting this year, we will be having an Annual Alumni Game every year on the 3rd Saturday of March.  For all you eager beavers (or those who need Visas), that will be March 20th next year.  We’ve chosen this date because it sits perfectly between the end of the regular season and the start of preparation for Nationals.  We’ve also chosen this date because we want to ensure that we can have time at the start of April and also later in May and the Summer to provide additional alumni tournaments where possible.  We’ll get back to that in a second.

The Alumni Game this year will start at 8:00pm at Lee Valley Ice Centre (right after a Lions game).  We’ll have a combination of an informal scrimmage alongside some skills competition events and a hardest shot competition. After the session we’ll be heading to the Clapton Heart for drinks and an all-around good ol’ time. In the future, we’re going to be working on bringing the time of the event earlier to provide a more formal game (or games) to ensure we can all get to our favorite pub, the Princes of Wales. We would also like to implement some other improvements in coming years like new alumni jerseys for the game, an actual Alumni vs. Students Game (which will require registration and more organization), and a proper awards ceremony.  If you’d like to get involved with any or all of this, please let us know!

If you'd like play in the game please fill out this form, we'll email you with additional information closer to the game!

In this article, we’ll also be announcing our Award Ceremony on Friday March 20th at Passyunk Avenue.  Unfortunately, there is no silver lining (yet) for our awards after leaving UoL.  Many will remember how much fun the Purples Ball and Awards Ceremonies.  And how could we forget the Purples Ball… not only were they a great opportunity for our players who won awards, they were often an absolutely unhinged celebration at the end of the year in an amazing venue.  We have plans to bring back the pomp and circumstance (maybe while keeping the hinges on) with an awards ceremony in a venue matching the grandeur of Senate House as well as the formality of the Black-Tie event.

Sadly, our Black-Tie event will have to wait for another year.  At the moment, all of our funding and resources are going to keeping just one team alive and healthy.  We've mentioned a few times that the cost per player has almost tripled now that we're no longer subsidized by the university. Our absolute number one priority is to keep players on the ice, regrow our team, and make sure that players can afford to do it. The last thing we want is students to be forced to make financial sacrifices just so they can play on the team (something our author had to do when first joining the team. Borrowing money from teammates to pay for your team socks is never a fun time).

So, in place of our grand event, we will be hosting a much cozier event at Passyunk Avenue, our favorite sports bar in London.  We’ll be handing out awards to both students and alumni acknowledging and celebrating not only their sporting achievements but also their support for a club that is slowly regrowing.

But!  We’re always looking towards the future with our new team and our charities.  One of our most important goals (which everyone is hopefully aware of at this point) is to ensure that we reconnect with our alumni base and our former Dragons. Like we said above, we’re all about continuity here so hop on the continuity train and help us get to our destination together (choo choo)!

One of the ways we want to do that is to provide sponsorship opportunities to ensure that we can continue to provide an Alumni Game and a proper Award Ceremony.  This entails naming rights for sponsored events or awards as well as developing a series of awards named after Dragons Hall of Famers and other influential members in our almost 25 years of Dragons history.

If you are keen on sponsoring an event like the Alumni Game or sponsoring other parts of the club like Nationals, Jerseys, Travel, or an Award, please get in touch with us at

manager@londondragons.com.

Or if you'd like to donate immediately please check out our donations page!

The last thing we’d like to touch on today are some of our other events.  We mentioned tournaments above which are only one of the things we’d like to do.  Just recently we had somewhere between 15 and 20 Dragons and alumni at the Olympics as well as multiple watching parties across London with current students, alumni, and friends.  We'd like to set up more opportunities for Dragons to connect during major events so keep an eye out on our social media for future opportunities.

If you follow our newsletter, you’ll also have seen that we had a Christmas party at Passyunk which was apparently a fantastic time if you didn’t leave at 10pm when it was just getting started… 👀👀👀

We also have a list of tournaments we’d like to enter alumni and players into including some in Amsterdam, Poland, France, and the US (specifically some nice 3-on-3 pond hockey tournaments). So please sign up for our newsletter and join our WhatsApp group so you can stay in the know and reconnect with some of your best hockey friends.

Before we leave, a quick notice of our 3rd Annual Big Networking Event in Hyde Park on May 23rd starting at 10:00 am. Like its title, this is the 3rd year we’ll be having our very informal networking event in Hyde Park.  The theme is Hawaiian Cowboy Professional, and our hope is that these informal networking events will help younger players feel more comfortable chatting and getting to know alumni and vice versa.  Just like Sesame Street taught us, we’re all unique and interesting individuals.  This might not always come across in more formal spaces so we’re using a day of fun in the sun to break down professional barriers and have fun!

All of the Dragons Links and Webpages:

At the bottom of every article we'll also include links to all of our web pages and our forms. As always, please help us in our journey to reinvigorate the Dragons after UoL cut all sports!

• If you were on the Dragons, please help us keep in touch with our Alumni Contact Update form!