Aroundtown Magazine July/August 2022

Aroundtown MEETS
meets
Val Hoyle
Trundled in the back of her
dad’s green transit van,
a 12-year-old schoolgirl
captained a bunch of her
friends from Swinton to a
game of five-a-side football
at Rawmarsh baths.
While that might sound commonplace by
today’s standards of parents ferrying their kids
around to after-school sports clubs, this was
in the late 1960s when women and girls were
actively prevented from playing football.
That remarkable 12-year-old girl was a young
Val Hoyle who’d courageously created a girls’
football team out of lack of opportunities at
school. The same fledgling five-a-side team
would go on to shape the women’s game in
Rotherham, opening up a whole new world of
sporting prospects for generations to come.
Almost 53 years later, prime playmaker
Val is still involved in what has since become
Rotherham United Women Football Club. In
those five decades she’s been the founder,
player, coach, chair and now club secretary,
inspiring a whole host of her sporting
contemporaries along the way. For
her dedication, Val, now 65,
recently won the
“
Women footballers still
weren’t accepted back then
and it was difficult to break
down those barriers.
”
prestigious Women’s FA Lifetime Achievement
Award after being nominated by a current
Rotherham United Women player.
We were privileged to catch a word with
Rotherham United’s key ambassador for
women’s football to hear more about how she’s
never let anything hold her back.
Born in Colchester, Essex in 1957, Val is the
youngest of three children; her parents, Reginald
and Joyce, met when Joyce was relocated down
south from Rotherham to work as a land army
girl during WWII.
The family moved to Rotherham when Val was
two, residing in Rawmarsh before relocating to
Swinton when Val was 11. It is here where her
love of sport was borne and nurtured.
“The only other kids on my street were boys,
so all my friends were lads. If you didn’t like
sport or weren’t sporty enough to join in then
you’d have nobody to play with. I played for the
school in all sports: hockey, rounders, netball,
athletics. Anything to do with sports, that was my
bag. But it wasn’t accepted then for girls to play
football at school,” Val says.
At the time, the FA had a blanket ban on
women and girls playing football on association
pitches, having deemed it ‘unsuitable for
females’ when the ban was set in 1921. As a
result, women and girls had been pushed into
the shadows for almost half a century before the
ban was lifted in 1971.
Never one to be deterred, Val and a friend
who was also interested in football approached
a couple of boys in their year group to swap their
football lesson for the girls’ cooking class.
Soon after, encouraged by her parents, Val
established the five-a-side girls’ team which
coupled up as a youth club, made up of preteen
girls from the Kilnhurst area. Reginald
would transport the team around in his van to
wherever they were playing, which was usually
Rawmarsh baths on Haugh Road, the pool
covered up with boards so they could play.
Val started off as a goal keeper to fill the role
nobody else wanted, then moved to left wing,
left midfield, before finishing up in her favourite
position, centre half.
As the girls grew into young women, Val and
her older sister Annetta formed an 11-a-side
women’s team when she was 17 called Kilnhurst
Shooting Stars. Consisting of mostly young
married women with a connection to the youth
team, they played in a Sheffield league against
only a handful of women’s teams.
“Women footballers still weren’t accepted
back then and it was difficult to break down
those barriers. But we set the foundations
for where women in football are at today. I
never envisioned we’d still be around all these
years later.”
Home games were initially on council-owned
pitches in Kilnhurst and the team designed their
own badge to reflect the shooting stars name.
Over the years the team has been known under
various guises, including Kilnhurst Ladies,
Milmoor Ladies and Parkgate Ladies. They have
been affiliated with Rotherham United for almost
twenty years and now call Roundwood Sports
Complex in Rawmarsh their home.
At one stage, the club was one of the better
women’s teams in Yorkshire for the trophies
they’d won. Throughout the ‘00s, the club
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