Sport and membership organisations

England Hockey club and player portal

National governing body

England Hockey needed to replace a WordPress-hosted club portal with a system that could support clubs, committees and players properly. I built the replacement as a Laravel application on Azure.

Situation

England Hockey supports a large national network of clubs, each run by volunteer committees. The existing club portal was a WordPress-hosted solution that had grown well beyond what it was designed for.

Club and player administration, committee access and communication with the governing body were all being served by a platform that was difficult to extend and awkward to scale as demand grew around registration periods and the season calendar.

Constraints

The portal serves volunteer committee members rather than full-time administrators, so the interface had to be usable by people who might log in only a handful of times a season.

It also had to fit alongside England Hockey's wider platform estate rather than becoming an isolated system with its own separate account model.

Work

I designed and built the replacement portal as a Laravel application hosted on Azure.

The work included:

rebuilding the club and player administration experience with a clearer, more modern interface
committee and role-based access so clubs can manage who in their committee can see and do what
linking club and organisational records to individual user accounts
single sign-on so the portal sits alongside England Hockey's other platforms rather than adding another separate login
club-facing dashboards covering club information, accreditation progress and comparison against other clubs nationally and locally
designing for the seasonal load pattern the platform sees around registration and competition periods

Technical approach

The portal is a Laravel application running on Azure, replacing the previous WordPress-hosted setup.

Moving to a framework-based application gave a proper domain model for clubs, committees, roles and players, rather than fitting membership administration into a content management system that was never intended for it.

Hosting on Azure allowed the platform to scale with the seasonal peaks around registration and the competition calendar, and to sit within the governing body's wider infrastructure and identity setup.

Outcome

Clubs get a single portal for administration, committee management and their relationship with the governing body, rather than working around the limits of the previous site.

Role-based committee access means volunteer committees can hand over responsibilities as their membership changes each season, and the move to Laravel on Azure gives England Hockey a foundation that can be extended in phases rather than rebuilt again.