HOCKEY umpire and administrator Terry Cook believes Premier League football could learn a thing or two from the sport to which he is devoted.

The 60-year-old and his wife Alison, from Kings Thorn, are both hockey officials and are a driving force behind the sport at a regional level.

Terry is the long-standing chairman of the Davis Wood Men’s Hockey League and oversaw the revamp of the divisional structure a couple of years ago.

He is also president of West Hockey Association and vice-chairman of Hereford Hockey Club.

Alison, a Herefordshire girl, is the secretary of Herefordshire Hockey Association and has just stood down as the men’s league Premier secretary after 15 years.

She still serves on the league committee as Herefordshire’s representative.

Terry, who works part-time in merchandising, said: “Hockey is a family sport and sometimes you have four generations of the same family involved in a team on the same day, which not many other sports can lay claim to.

“We want to encourage children to play hockey and there is a zero tolerance approach to any forms of bad language.

“Youngsters can see the football stars in the Premier League shouting and swearing at the referee.

“But players are not allowed to get away with bad language in hockey. If a player swears at an umpire – that player will be sent off the pitch.”

Terry and Alison, who married in 1991, moved to Herefordshire around 16 years ago after being heavily involved in the hockey scene in Wales.

“I took over the league chairmanship about 16 years ago and it’s probably many more years than I would have liked,” joked Terry.

“We will always listen to complaints from the clubs and we had a complete revamp of the league structure a couple of years ago, which has cut down the travelling.

“As a league, we have meetings in Taunton but it’s not a difficult job to chair. People at the clubs do the work and I am simply the political figurehead who helps to pull everything together.”

Terry, who started playing hockey when he was at school in Bath, says there is work to do to rejuvenate the profile of the regional body.

“West Hockey Association has slipped a bit and we are running schools’ tournaments and trying to get its profile back.

“England Hockey must have five regions –and the West is made up of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and the Channel Islands.”

He is impressed with the enthusiasm for male hockey in the county.

“Hereford Cathedral School, Hereford Sixth Form College and Earl Mortimer College are the main schools who play sport in our county,” he said.

“At club level, Hereford men are refocusing, Leominster have got a pretty good squad with young players coming through, and Ross have come through the leagues and are a good, honest club.”

Perhaps surprisingly, there was a 15-year spell in Terry’s life when, after leaving university and moving to Warrington, he fell out of love with the sport, and watched football on a Saturday.

He later moved to Pontypool in South Wales and, after a marriage break-up, rediscovered his joy for hockey.

“Someone I knew played hockey for Abergavenny, so I started playing again and I became club fixture and match secretary,” he recalled.

He switched to Cwmbran, also taking on the fixture secretary and match secretarial duties.

Terry then became involved in Welsh Hockey, publicising the league’s results to the regional press and sitting on the South Wales League committee.

After retiring from playing, he started umpiring and qualified through the Welsh system.

He became the umpires’ liaison officer Whitchurch, looking after visiting umpires from National League clubs, and officiated for Wales age-group teams in cities such as Vienna, Sicily and Prague.

Terry recalled: “But this time, I had met Alison and she got roped into doing things in Cwmbran and started to umpire in hockey matches.”

The pair both chaired the South Wales Umpires Association and were a bastion for the administration of the hockey in the area.

After moving to living Herefordshire, the couple continued to umpire in the South Wales League for 10 years before deciding to change their allegiance to the English system.

Terry added: “I think hockey is ticking along in Herefordshire. We are a small county and good players who are intelligent, tend to go to university and don’t come back due to the lack of employment. I love hockey and I always tell people how great a sport it is.”