Field Hockey Canada honours one of the game’s early pioneers
Charlotte Warren excelled at all levels of the game including her prestigious role as the Chairwoman of the Canadian Field Hockey Council, and helped expand the game at the grassroots level.
“I enjoyed it and I felt, although I wasn’t really very conscious of it at the time, I was contributing,” said Warren. “If I was having a good time, maybe other people could have a good time and enjoy themselves.”
Warren was raised in University Endowment Lands, British Columbia, and was introduced to the game through her father Harry Warren. Harry was coaching young boys in the Vancouver area at the time, and he had Charlotte’s help him with replacing broken field hockey sticks.
“I covered all the strings and carefully wrapped the sticks up,” said Warren.
Warren did that until she turned 12, and decided she’d rather start playing. She got the chance to play when her parents saw an ad in the newspaper about a local grass hockey club.
Warren would then build off those humble beginnings and start playing for the Greater Vancouver Senior Women’s Grass Hockey League at just 12 years old. This helped her build a good reputation later on in university when she wanted to play for UBC.
“Well, it came about because the coach at the time, May Brown, was the UBC coach. She’d seen me hanging around the field for six years and so when I went to UBC, the first thing I did was try out for the hockey team,” said Warren.
At UBC, she won the Watson trophy as the outstanding player in the Greater Vancouver Women’s Grass Hockey League in 1955, a City Championship in 1956, and became team captain in 1957.
She did all this while being a championship-caliber badminton player, President of the UBC Women’s Athletic Association, and working in the Canadian Air Force.
“It was challenging and it probably showed in my marks which were not very good, but at least I passed,” said Warren.
One of Warren’s first administrative roles in the game was as the first editor of the women’s section for the Canadian Field Hockey News.
She also played a crucial role in building an inter-high school system for field hockey players in B.C. to play with each other across the province. This earned her a “Lifetime of Field Hockey” award from the Vancouver Women’s Field Hockey Association, decades later in 2018.
“We did a lot of work and you know there were no computers, no iPhones or anything like that to make life easy. Everything had to be written down,” said Warren.
Warren said the reason she helped spread the game by making it more accessible in high schools and more visible through media is that she wanted others to have just as much fun as she did
“I think it’s because I was enjoying it so much and I wanted other people to have the same experience,” said Warren.
Her dedication to building the sport led her to being elected as Chair of the Canadian Field Hockey Council. As chair, she helped serve as a liaison to merge the women’s and men’s associations. Warren would then cap off her administrative career in the late 90s by helping bring together the Five Nations Tournament in Vancouver in 1997, and the women’s Four Nations Tournament in 1999. When looking back on her career, she takes pride in how much she contributed to the game at the grassroots level by organizing inter-high school sports in B.C.
“I still think that’s my most important legacy, and that wasn’t near the end of my tenure at all,” said Warren. “The schools and the kids were not committed to hockey and I had to develop a structure that would interest them.”
Warren was also inducted into the UBC Sports Hall of Fame in 1996, in addition to being inducted into the Field Hockey Canada Hall of Fame.
