Richard Bywater has been answering to the name ‘Buz’ for 40-odd years.

That’s almost as long as he’s been playing for Newent Hockey Club, who he joined as a 15-year-old 35 years ago.

“I started going down to the club with my mum in the early 70s when I was seven,” he said.

“She founded the ladies’ section of the club and I used to go and watch her. I’d pick up a stick and hit a few balls and it all went from there.”

It certainly did. He started playing hockey at Newent Comprehensive School at 14 and joined Newent Hockey Club a year later.

By the time he was 18 he was in the first team and, remarkably, he’s been there ever since. He’s twice served as captain and has been the club’s lead coach since 2004, taking on the role at the end of his second stint as skipper.

It’s been a real family affair for Buz because his mum Gill founded the club’s ladies’ section and was their president up until last year.

So where did the nickname Buz come from?

“It was when I was at Picklenash Junior School in Newent,” he laughed. “It came from a BT advert in the late 70s which featured a talking cartoon bird called Buzby.

“We had four kids called Richard in our class and we all had different nicknames. One day one of the Richard’s turned round to me in class and said, ‘Will you stop talking, you’re just like Buzby!’ The name just stuck although it has been shortened to Buz since then.

“Very few people know me by my real name.”

They may not know him by his real name but Buz is very well known in the hockey world and Newent in particular.

“It’s a fantastic club,” he said, “we’re like a family. It’s a very sociable club. We play together, we party together. The majority of my friends I’ve met through the hockey club and quite a few of the husbands and wives met there too.”

The club have come a long way since Buz first started playing in the days when they only ran two teams.

“We’ve got three senior men’s teams, we run a junior boys’ team called the Badgers, we’ve got three senior women’s teams and a junior girls’ team called the Vixens,” he said with justifiable pride. “We also run a mixed team, a veterans’ team for men and an inter-club super vets’ mixed team for the over-50s.”

Buz, of course, is eligible for those vets’ teams these days but he is proud of the fact that he can still cut it in the club’s first team.

“I’ll play anywhere in defence or midfield,” he said. “I just want to play. I’m not the quickest – although I’m not slow – but I’m fit.

“Some of the university students may think ‘Keep up old man’ when they see me at the start of a game but I’m still going strong at the end of it.”

While Buz clearly still enjoys taking on the young ‘uns, he also enjoys playing for the West of England Over-50s.

“I used to play for the over-40s and over-45s as well,” he said. “The nice thing about that is you can play to a good standard against people of your own age without having to chase students!”

Newent’s flagship teams for the men and women play at a good standard, too, something that Buz takes great pride in.

“The ladies have just won promotion to the West of England Premier Division for the first time ever,” he enthused, “and although the men got relegated at the end of last season to Conference North that is still the third tier of the West of England League which in football terms I like to think of as the old style Division Four.”

You can be sure that the two-times Gloucestershire hockey coach of the year – who coaches the juniors on a Tuesday evening – will be working just as hard this season to push the club forward.

The club train and play at Newent Community School and Buz added: “We’ve got one of the best hockey facilities in Gloucestershire. The astroturf, the changing rooms, everything about the set-up. We’re very, very lucky.”

Newent Hockey Club are very, very lucky to have Buz too.