A chat with Mike van Woerkom
I sat down with Dalefield and Wairarapa men’s hockey manager Mike van Woerkom with a cup of tea and some delicious home-made cinnamon pinwheels (thanks Carol) to chat about Dalefield’s season, the great result for Wairarapa at the recent National Hockey Championships, and his involvement with hockey in general.
Every time I go to the turf at Clareville I see Mike assiduously hard at work and have only ever associated him with the hockey community, so I was a little surprised to learn that he didn’t play the game as a youngster but instead played football - firstly at Featherston and then for Douglas Villa - and although he says “he wasn’t very good” I suspect that like everything else he’s involved with, he was a bit better than he claims. He became involved with hockey through his wife Carol who had played at secondary school and started a hockey team at St Teresa’s School. “Within three years, I kid you not, at a little school with, it might have been about 90 or 100 students, she had about 40 of them playing hockey. All with a little polar fleece hoodie... with St Teresa’s on the back, and they're all there with little hockey sticks. That's where it really started. And Benedict started playing before he was at school. He started playing as a four and a half-year-old.”
Mike and the family became increasingly involved in the sport and today the van Woerkom family is synonymous with Wairarapa hockey, particularly the Dalefield Club, with Mike and Carol involved in team management, administration and promotion, and three of their four adult children - Daniel, Benedict and Katherine - all playing and coaching the club’s senior teams.
2026 was a very successful year for Dalefield's top two teams with the men winning the Wellington premier competition for the second year running, and also the Intercity championship, while the women were unbeaten throughout the season but didn’t have such a good day in the final. Oliver Bunny scored the most goals in the Wellington Men’s P1 competition and Rowan Yeo was fourth [Wellington Hockey statistics show Oliver scored 17 goals but Mike thinks he scored more than that]. Oliver scored 28 goals of the total 92 that the Dalefield team scored in all competitions in the year. That’s thirty percent.
“And you sort of take it for granted a little bit that a young fellow up front put all those goals away. And when you look at some games, they're crucial goals, they keep you on the right side of the scoreboard and keep scoreboard pressure on the opposition, if that makes sense.
“To be honest, the team, in my opinion, played very well. There was some really lovely hockey being played. Really lovely hockey being coached and assisted, and you know, there are some wise old heads from the back to the middle to the front.
“The Dalefield team is, in every sense, almost a Wairarapa representative team so we should really win the Wellington competition regularly if the quality of our local players is good enough."
So why is Dalefield such a strong club? “Well, from the men’s perspective it started back in 2015. Benedict was the driver behind the men for a number of years. He’d seen all these guys who were playing for Victoria University, a couple were playing for Hutt, a couple were playing for Harbour City over in the Wellington Comp or whatever. He said, why don’t we get them all back?
“It never came about in 2014 but in 2015 it happened and it’s been that journey of twelve years since then. That’s why Dalefield is strong now.
“I think we're lucky at the men's level that we have two player coaches of exceedingly high talent, Benedict and Dane. Yep, they run the play with a whole bunch of senior players there and then out the back we've got Dave who's the physio and the waterman and the van driver. Then we've got Bernie, who's the trainer and the motivator and does the, you know, rev-up at trainings and before a game.
And then we've got Mike who runs the books with the beloved Carol who does everything else that keeps Mike in line. Hey, look, I'm going to say, there's lots of people who share the load in that P1 men’s team.”
He says that while the women’s senior team
doesn’t have the same number of people behind the scenes, much of their success is down to the tireless efforts of manager Karen O’Connor and husband Michael as well as the abilities of the player coach, Mike's daughter Katherine Reisima, assisted by Karen and Michael’s daughter Michael. (Another example of a family very involved in a senior Dalefield team). “So there's just a husband and wife, and the player/coaches who are either on the field or in the dugout during the game. Karen scurries around managing the team, booking vans and doing this and that in the kitchen. It’s a tremendous amount of work that she does.”
The Wellington Hockey Association lists four of Dalefield’s premier women in the top ten goal scorers for the year. Katherine Reisima third with eleven goals, Mandy Yeo (ten), Felicity Reidy (eight), Abby Crawley (six), and then Reese Robertson in eleventh place with six goals. Although those numbers may also be wrong, it still shows the depth of quality players that Dalefield has.
As well as the two premier teams, Dalefield has two other senior teams that play in the local Wairarapa competition. The club also has a number of junior teams, and is affiliated to the Wairarapa Hockey Association who run the local leagues, and leases and looks after the turfs and clubrooms.
A lot of other sporting clubs could learn a lot from Mike’s dedication and promotion of their team sponsors. Anybody who has been to a Dalefield senior men’s home game will know that Mike always picks up the microphone and goes through and thanks every single sponsor. The team is also one of the few that hands out match-day programmes that not only name both the home and away players, has a summary of recent results, and also includes advertisements for all their sponsors. He says that it is very important to look after all the sponsors and supporters. “We try to. The one thing we can do is wave the flag, and on the home games we do the pre-game introduction over the microphone. We put up as many advertising hoardings as we can in and around the courtyard. Sponsors also get three or four mid-season update emails from me saying how we're going - usually after a win because it's easy to say something nice when you've had a win than after a loss! And then I've just, yesterday, printed out an end of season thank-you report and summary, along with a copy of our full page Times Age advert, along with four or five programmes to show where they featured. I said in an email to the boys, don't you ever take them (our sponsors) for granted.”
Concomitant to Dalefield’s senior men’s success, the Wairarapa Men’s Representative team did very well at the National Hockey Championships held in Wellington in September. The squad which was primarily made up of Dalefield or former Dalefield players ended the tournament in fourth place in the first tier men’s competition, a very good performance considering it was the team’s first year in the top grade.
Mike paused for a while before answering when I suggested that he would be very happy with that result. “Hmm, yes. I think my first goal would have been, and I’m sure it was one of the boys as well, to retain their tier one status, so not to get promoted in 2025 and demoted in 2026. So job number one, avoid the drop. Which we did. Right off the back of one good crossover victory over North Harbour. That was that rainy night full of contention and tension. And then there were issues at the start, around the starting times.
“Fourth, it looks lovely on paper. But if you look at the results there was not a single win in there, not an outright win to finish fourth.
“What played into our hands was that the first three games meant nothing. They were just a precursor to the big game on Thursday which was win or lose. And, it turned out that the other three teams in our pool were all in the semi finals, so our pool comprised the four semi-finalists.
“And having shared that, I’ll say that the boys were magnificent. It all boiled down to that one game and when Harbour went two nil up, you just kind of think, well, any other team would just pack it in and say we’ll take a 2-0 loss because we’re the little boys from the country. But they showed some ticker and fought back. We could have won the bloody thing.
“We had three PCs in those last minutes before Dane did equalise and another was scrambled away. We could have won it 3-2 in ordinary time. So you know, I shouldn’t be ungracious for the team. We beat North Harbour on the night so that in itself is a nice thing - to think that we can foot it with the bigger associations.
“Please acknowledge this when you write this story. Many, many, many, many, many of the teams, in fact I don’t know if any had their Black Sticks back from the World Cup that has just finished about a month or three weeks earlier. Yet Dane Lett, our beloved Dane Lett, came back and put his hand up to play for Wairarapa. He was probably one of very few, one, two or three current Black Sticks on display at the NHC.”
And so what’s the future like for both the Dalefield and Wairarapa men’s teams, and for Mike van Woerkom?
“There’s always the general excitement in the changing room when you win a final, and that’s the second final in a row, and now some of the players are talking about the three-peat. I imagine we’ll have another strong team and hopefully our core players will be back.”
Asked about the team’s longer term plans and strategy, and his plans for the future, Mike pensively replies. “Yes, that’s been on our minds for four or five years already but there’s the challenge, like any team of youngsters, they drift off to university. It’s that age group. It is what it is. So the worry is what happens in a year or two or three when Dane says thanks but no thanks, When Benedict’s body breaks down and Daniel decides to say no, when Rowan Yeo decides to give up. There are any number of players who are just on that edge of saying life is bigger than hockey.
"I also don’t think the club has a succession plan. It (the team management) is a huge job. We quietly flag it, gently, each year, Bernie and Dave and I, and when we say gently you look around the other parent base, you look down the list and think, who would be prepared to put their hand up and say, I'm going to take over Mike's job and I'm going to take over Bernie's job and Dave's job. You know, if three others are interested, then Bernie and Dave and Mike can quietly just ease out to the background.
“Yeah, this has been twelve seasons that we’ve done. It’s twelve good seasons, some up and some down but mainly pretty good, and if we played say eighteen games a season, what’s that? 180, best part of 220 games, we might have lost twenty games maximum which is pretty good.
“Somewhere along the line we have to pass the baton. I’m not over thinking it, but a little selfishly Mike and Carol probably won’t invest a lot of energy into the men’s team when Daniel and Benedict slide out. We might swing our attention to Katherine. She’s a couple of years younger and we’ll support her wherever she goes on her journey.”
Thank you Mike for this insight and here's hoping that the Dalefield hockey club continues to dominate at the top level.