From the Archives: The Dragon's Origin Story

In addition to our weekly Player, Alumni, or Trustee Spotlight, we’ll also be doing a news and information series to help people keep up with the Dragons.  We’ll cover things like our history, jersey designs, our charitable structure, and more about the BUIHA. We want to give our members and readers some fun bits about our past, strengthen our legacy, but also to help demystify ice hockey in the UK.

Our first article will be about the club, or team itself, University of London Dragons. We’d like to thank Colleen May, Russell Ellis, Terry Han, Dmitry Strusevich, Vincent Garcia, and Mark Davidson for helping with some of the early information about the start of the club.

What is the University of London?

We want to add some clarity to what the University of London is and how it works before we jump into the details of our club’s founding.  The University of London (UoL) was founded in 1836 by a Royal Charter created to provide degrees to students regardless of religious affiliation. Back in the day, many universities around London and in the UK had specific religious affiliations which restricted education to those who were practicing in that religion.

The University of London was created by two rival institutions: University College London (UCL) and King's College London (KCL) and functioned primarily as a degree awarding body while leaving teaching up to the different universities.  It slowly opened up its doors to women in 1878 and continued to relax restrictions on attendees.  In the early 1900s, UoL expanded with The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London), and Imperial College London. 

Over the 20th century, the University of London would expand to have around 20 institutions in its federated system.  It grew well beyond its degree-granting duties to include teaching of its own, intercollegiate housing and buildings, and more that was slowly outgrowing its administrative purpose.

In the early 2000s UoL started to fragment as individual universities gained prominence and wanted to compete internationally.  Imperial College London was the first to start breaking away by awarding its own degrees in 1998 (rather than UoL degrees) with UCL, King’s and LSE following suit in the mid-2000s. 

Imperial College London continued with its efforts to break away and finally succeeded in 2007. Alongside various mergers, changing missions and visions of the federated members, and a larger focus on a more US-style emphasis on individual universities, UoL started to fragment and lose power.  Thus, leaving us with the UoL today which is still a loose federation of 17 member universities but one that provides little of what it did (particularly sports) in the last 200 years of its existence. 

Note to the reader: we wanted to fill people in on how UoL works as most of our players come in confused about what the University of London really is. Its structure is why we're able to pull from so many universities for the London Dragons. However, there is also a BUIHA rule that allows for Composite Teams where there are not enough members to support a full roster.

Although there are 17 universities as part of the University of London system and over 40 universities in London, ice hockey and sports funding has never been high enough priority to support large teams. Additionally, even though our team was funded by the 17 member universities' Student Unions, they never saw us as part of their umbrella. That meant we were, and still are, unable to attend things like Fresher's Fairs, Sports Fairs, or even advertise that our team is available to their students.

The University of London Union Purples

The journey to start the London Dragons began in 2001 with a convergence of several key individual starting with Terry Han, who had previously played for the Cambridge Blues and, at the time, had started studying at Queen Mary University of London. Han got involved with the Imperial Devils where he met Colleen May who had graduated from Oxford University and had previously played for the Women’s Blues.  The last piece of the puzzle was Russell Ellis who had also played at Oxford for the Vikings and was now at Imperial College.

It's common in the UK for university players to move between universities to pursue various levels of their degrees. Sometimes we'll get players who played at both Oxford and Cambridge to now play with us, or the opposite. We always try to keep healthy relations with our rivals because we never know when they'll become our teammates. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer!

Another Note: we wanted to provide a short history of UoL at the start also so we don’t have any confusion about why we’re talking about Imperial College when it’s not part of the University of London anymore. And because Imperial is one of our London-based rivals along with UCL (an article for a rainy day).  We also want to emphasize how important Imperial College was to the foundation and creation of our team, so a little clarification seemed necessary. 

Han worked closely with what is colloquially known as ULU, the University of London Student Union, to create the first London Purples in 2002. The first committee was composed of Terry Han as Club President, Chris Looney as Secretary, and Russell Ellis as Treasurer.     

At the start, as it was with the end, there was no funding for the team from ULU but the founding members of the team managed to make ends meet with support from Imperial College to play at Alexandra Palace and Park before moving to inexpensive midnight practices at Streatham Ice and Leisure Centre. 

Over the years, our teams have continued to play at Alley Pally and Streatham, along with the now defunct Sobell Ice Centre and our home at Lee Valley Ice Centre. We'll expand on our ice rinks here in London in one of our next articles. For now, we'll add that our A teams started practicing at Lee Valley the next year while our B Team continued late, late night sessions at Streatham. Our C Team spent their time at Sobell, a 1/3rd-sized rink. In 2019 we consolidated all of the teams to our 'Dragons Den' at Lee Valley to ensure that our teams weren't geographically separated and everyone could access 'normal' ice!

Let's hop back in time though to continue our story in 2002. The British Universities Ice Hockey Association (BUIHA) wouldn’t be created for another year, so the early Purples played friendlies and challenge matches against other university teams on an informal basis. 

The Nottingham Nationals Tournament

Although the BUIHA didn’t exist yet, the Nationals Tournament still did, in which university teams from across the nation would compete.  2002 would be the first Nationals Tournament the University of London Union Purples (eventually the London Dragons) would attend and the first of many to win!

The Purples would play Nottingham University in the semi-finals, a home ice advantage for the Mavericks.  They were reportedly a physical and tough team that was playing rough. A funny coincidence, the Dragons will be playing the Nottingham Mavericks April 24th in the Cup Championship Game.

Back to the history, which suggests that our very own Trustee and one of the founding members of the team, Dmitry Strusevich, had laid down the law with some of the chippier players on the Nottingham team, paving the way to a clean game.  The game surprisingly ended in a shootout with the game-winning goal scored by Jeff Wubs and a number of impressive saves by goaltender Simon Tallett. 

The final against Oxford was also tied 1-1 towards the end of the game with a late game penalty against the Purples.  At the end of the powerplay, Terry Han managed to intercept a D-to-D pass and shot a high glove side shot to score the game winning goal.

The Rest is History

The Nationals win was a major triumph for the Purples as it helped solidify their position with ULU and win an opportunity to get funding.  ULU had always, right up to the end, valued winning and competitive spirit, and a first-year win guaranteed the start of a long-lasting legacy.  The Dragons have continued on as the most decorated team in the BUIHA with 4 Nationals Titles, 6 Cup Titles, and 9 Division 1 South Titles with Nottingham in a close second with 3 National Titles, 4 Cup Titles, and 7 Division 1 North Titles.

Once the team had funding, they were moved to what has now become the Dragon’s Den or what most know it as, the Lee Valley Ice Centre! We've been there since 2003 and have slowly become a staple at the rink as the strongest team that resides within its walls. Next week we'll be posting an article about all of our rinks in London, so stay tuned!

The team was also allowed to send a contingent to the Purples Ball and although there were no purples awarded that night to the hockey team, Terry Han would receive one the next year. At the end of our season in April, we'll also be publishing an article on our awards recipients this year.

The Creation of the British Universities Ice Hockey Association (BUIHA)

We can't end this article just yet. The early history of the London Dragons sits alongside the early history of the British Universities Ice Hockey Association. According to the 2004 BUIHA National Championships program, the national university championships began with an idea from Alexis Rawlinson of the Oxford Vikings, who proposed bringing together the small number of university ice hockey teams then active in the UK. At that point, there were only seven university teams in existence, and the first championships were a much smaller event at Oxford Ice Rink involving just five teams. The following two tournaments were held at the National Ice Centre in Nottingham, where Newcastle won in 2002 and ULU/Dragons won in 2003.

By 2004, university hockey was starting to become a proper national structure rather than a loose collection of challenge matches and one-off tournaments. The 2004 championships at Ice Sheffield were the fourth Nationals and the first to be formally organized by the British Universities Ice Hockey Association. The tournament had expanded to sixteen teams across two days, and the trophy had been renamed the Rawlinson Plate in honor of Alexis Rawlinson’s role in helping launch the championships. The committee listed in the program shows how small and interconnected the university hockey world still was: Russell Ellis served as Chairman, Graham Brewer as Vice Chairman, Colleen May, captain of Oxford University Women’s Ice Hockey Club, as Secretary, Andy Miller of Newcastle as Fixtures Secretary, Simon Hopkins of Nottingham as EIHA/BUSA representative, and Emma Eckered, who had spent four years in Oxford, as Media/Funding Co-Ordinator.

This matters for the history of the Dragons because ULU, that would become the Purples and then the London Dragons, was already central to that early story. The club was there from the very start of modern British university ice hockey, not as a late arrival but as one of the teams helping define what the sport would become. That is why the early names linked to the Purples and Dragons, including Terry Han at Queen Mary, Russell Ellis with Oxford and Imperial connections, Colleen May from Oxford Women, and others around the emerging London side, matter so much. They were helping to build both the team and the university game itself.

We want to give a huge thank you to our founding members and honor their efforts in creating a lasting legacy:

• Terry H.

• Chris L.

• Russell E.

• Colleen M.

• Dmitry Strusevich

• Vincent G.

• Simon T. (G)

• Kristian M.

• Jeff W.

• Kristian K.

• Adrian C.

• Drake

• Dan

• Unknown Player 1

• Unknown Player 2

• Mark D. (Coach)

• 
  

As we regrow, we also want to make sure that we continue to honor the legacy and achievements of our founding members. If you've read our Reinvigorating the Legacy article, you'll know that through the hardship of COVID and UoL closing their doors, we've lost contact with a lot of our earlier members. Most of ours, the BUIHA's, and UoL's, records only start in 2008.

We want to make sure that we can get in touch and stay in touch with our alumni and need your help to do so!

You'll also notice that the roster above is incomplete. We need the help of our earlier members to fill in the gaps from the early years. Please invite your former linemates and friends to our page so we can start to rebuild our community.

And, if anyone is keen, we'd love to be able to fill out the rosters, schedules, and stats from those early days. If you have any photos, programs, manuals, game sheets, or any information about the 2002-2008 period please get in touch with us and let us know!

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!