York St John and the beautiful game – Part one

Love it or loathe it, a World Cup makes football almost impossible to ignore, so we couldn’t resist taking a look at the role the beautiful game has played at York St John over the years.

If you stroll over to our £8.9m sports site at Haxby road, you’ll find brand new facilities to support eight student football teams and the i2i soccer academy, as well as the local community and York St John staff. Additionally the University can boast a World Cup final referee amongst our Honorary Graduates and whilst some of our academic staff undertake ground-breaking, football-related research.  It’s clear that football is embedded into the DNA of our institution.

The teams

The earliest pictures we can find of York St John’s football teams  date back to 1909, although it’s very likely that football was played here before then. What is clear is that from the days of Principal Walker (1908-1935) football, along with many other sports, was an important part of college life; images of sports teams from across the early twentieth Century are displayed on the walls of Heritage Room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were years when our students excelled. In 1947 the college fielded three competitive football teams out of a student body of  just 200-300 men. The paper cutting to the right shows the kind of results the teams achieved.   The first team’s 1947/48 season was hailed as a ‘remarkable season’ after they recorded 20 wins from 26 games, scoring 111 goals along the way and conceding just 29. and beating the  ‘professional studded’ York City AFC by four goals to one.

Cup success was a little more elusive,  but in the 1950’s and 1960’s that started to change. In 1957 the football club celebrated one of their most successful seasons for many years, winning 28 of their 35 games and scoring 141 goals in the process. But it was victory in the Half Holiday Cup that made the headlines, when the college team beat R.A.F. Acaster Malbis 4-1 in the final to bring the cup to the College for the first time since 1930.

Throughout the 1960s students at York St John enjoyed more football success reaching no less than four consecutive cup finals. The team included Dick Bate (shown in pictures below), who is regarded as one of the finest football coach educators this country has ever known When Dick sadly passed away in April this year, there was an outpouring of tributes from the across the footballing community in the UK. You can read more about Dick and the impact he had on football in Part two of ‘York St John and the beautiful game’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In June this year, we were delighted to welcome a number of former students from those 1960s teams back to York St John. Ron Blackburn, Ron Wilkinson, and Malcolm Mills (all pictured above and left) returned to York St John some 51 years after completing their Physical Education programme. Walking around our Haxby Road sports site they were astounded by the state of the art artificial pitches and strength and conditioning gyms available to York St John students today, very different to the facilities students enjoyed in the 1960s!

 

This last academic year the University fielded eight competitive football teams in the British University & College Sport (BUCS) Championships; seven men’s teams and one women’s team competed. The Men’s 1^st team finished the season 2^nd in the Northern 3B League, and the Men’s 2^nd team not only won their league but also gained the greatest number of BUCS points of all York

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part two of this blog explores some of our alumni and honorary graduates from the world of football, as well as taking a look at some of the football related research published by our academic staff.