History | hrrjfc

Hallam Rangers was founded by John Melbourne in the 1970. He was one of the founder members of the Sheffield & District Junior Sunday League which was formed the year before. John became a long standing chairman of the league and from these humble beginnings this league has become probably the largest junior football league in Europe. However, for the first 20 years Sunday football for juniors was frowned upon by the FA and the Sheffield & Hallamshire CFA. As a result Hallam Rangers only had one team because no one was willing to run another team.

After John in 1972, Mike Corner took over for a couple of years and later he became editor of the Sheffield Star newspaper. In the early days of the club, we had 40 children at the Tapton School gym on a Friday night (health and safety was not invented then).

Colin Tandy, the current president of the Junior League took over the club from 1973 through to 1981.

Dave Crookes picked up the club chairman mantle in the 90's and he helped run a “Score a goal event!” at Hallam Junior School summer fete. Football never stopped. Charles and his wife practically ran everything themselves and Hallam School was our home ground where there were 2 pitches.

In 1996 we used the Hallam Community Centre pitches and School pitches. Hallam Community was very much part of our Club then and part of the subs went to HCA to maintain membership. This allowed us to use their premises extensively including getting access to their changing rooms and their hall for our end of year’s presentation.

The use of Hallam School pitches continued up until 2004 with Hans Heap as chairman having succeeded Charles in 1998. The pitches started to deteriorate at this time, so we moved up to Redmires for the 2005 season and George Walker was now our chairman. At the time the club adopted green and white hoops as the club colours which we continue to play in today.

Today sees Dave Hunt as club chairman supported by Paul Michalowski who has served the club since the turn of the century.

Since then we have built up the club, initially using 2 mini pitches and 3 larger pitches for age groups U8 to U16. This continued with us creating a girls team in 2006 which ran for 4-5 years playing at Redmires pitch then moving to a pitch at Beauchief Hall.

The club really has moved forward in our time with teams from U8 to U18 and girl’s team. This has now culminated with U8 to U16 across Castle Dyke (U8 to U11) and Redmires (U12-U16). We also use a pitch at Tapton School for one of the U16 and U18 at Loxley.

We have been running a Saturday Academy for the last 4 years and this is very much a route to creating a new U8 team each season. Boys and girls can come up to train under a skilled coach, and start to learn and try out new skills.

We have built and developed a working partnership with Hallam School since they have had a new PE dept set up from 2011.

Our headquarters for meetings is the Sportsman Pub, Lodge Moor S10 and we are proud that the Club has achieved and maintained FA Charter Standard status for 7 years