Larkhall Athletic Football Club secretary and director Tracey Hill leads an amazing double life. And if you address her by her correct honorific, you will have an inkling about what she gets up to away from the Camella Stadium.
Larkhall Athletic’s long-time secretary, Professor Tracey Hill, spent three decades working at Bath Spa University before taking early retirement in 2023 | Photo © Richard Briggs, inset photo courtesy of Tracey Hill
Professor Tracey Hill is in her 13th season as Larkhall’s secretary. Since 2022 she has been a director of Larkhall Sports Club, the football club’s parent company.
For the first decade of her spell as Larks’ secretary, she worked full-time as a professor at Bath Spa University.
She took early retirement in 2023, leaving Bath Spa as Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture.
Since then she has been working as a freelance academic, and is classed as an emerita professor – one who has retired but can keep the title of Professor in recognition of service and achievements.
She took over as the football club’s secretary in 2013, when they were in the Western League. That season they won promotion to the Southern League, where they remain.
Prof Hill told the Echo: “I took over from Garry Davy and it was pretty straightforward in the Western League. The Southern League was a real jump up.
“I worked out once that during the season it’s probably two days of work a week. So when I was working full-time, which I was until two years ago, football took up most of Sunday, and many hours during the week, and obviously Saturday. So it’s a lot.
“We’ve got a sort of secretary solidarity thing going on, because a lot of people who haven’t been secretaries don’t understand what’s involved.
“They think we just rush around with bits of paper on a Saturday and that’s it. It’s mostly email and not visible to many people.
“We’re lucky at Larkhall – we’ve got an awful lot of volunteers here. We’re almost all volunteers. That does mean you have to kind of pitch in.
“What we don’t have is a lot of people who are comfortable doing things like social media – that kind of stuff, anything internet-based.
“I run the X account most of the time, Alex Goss does the Instagram but it’s the same posts. I edit the programme as well, and I do the bar occasionally.
“But secretary stuff is pretty full on, it’s one of the bigger jobs [in non-league football]. It’s not cleaning the dressing rooms or fixing light bulbs, so it doesn’t really register in most people’s minds.
“I see the whole game for two reasons. I have to keep stats and record things as they happen. Also, I don’t want to miss the game.
“I’ve always said that if my role at the club involved me missing football, I’d be stopping it. There’s no way I’m missing games.
“In an average season, I’d miss maybe one or two games in the whole season. I’ve missed one this season already, because it was Wokingham Town away in the FA Cup on a Sunday and I wasn’t available.
“I started going to away games the season we won Western League Division One [2008-09], but not all the time. But I’m a bit of a completist, so it wasn’t long before it became every game.
“And when you’re secretary, you don’t have to be there, we can work round it, but there are other people who don’t do this stuff regularly and they worry about getting it right. I worry about them getting it right. And if you make mistakes, you [the club] get fined and there are no excuses.
“Before the season starts I sort out our friendlies, player registrations and stuff like that, and then you kind of get into it, full flow, with fixture after fixture after fixture. Cup competitions are different with different sorts of systems.
“Fundamentally I really love the club and I really love the players and just being around, and the people you meet.
“I was a year away from finishing my PhD and a job [at Bath Spa University] came up. It was part-time and only a temporary post. It delayed the completion of my PhD by a year as I got into my new job but I made up for the time later on that year. And I was there for nearly 30 years.
“I was head of department for 15 years, which is another very similar kind of role [to being a football secretary] in some respects. The paperwork never ends, the responsibility never really ends, you’re constantly frustrated with people not doing things properly.
“When I left work, I was Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture. I was made emerita so I’ve got a kind of honorary position at the university, I’ve still got an email account and I can still use online research resources.
“It’s technically easier now [to deal with football duties] because I’m not working full-time, but I’m still doing lots of stuff. I’ve got a paper to write, two actually, fairly soon. I’ve just agreed to do a talk in the autumn. I also do walking tours in the City of London.
“I specialise in early modern London, the 16th and 17th centuries. So if I’m not here, I’m in the City of London in the archives – which is a kind of a weird switch.
“Every now and again my two worlds collide. One of my friends [from the university] came to a recent game but the biggest crossover was when we had a fundraiser for the new clubhouse development when we got promoted and [now-retired movie director] Ken Loach, who’s been brilliant and supportive, did a screening and discussion of Looking For Eric.
“A lot of my colleagues in media and film came up for that and suddenly there was all these people from Bath Spa at my club and it was slightly weird. I was like ‘This is my club, don’t you dare dis it’.
“An unexpected benefit of writing match reports and press releases for the club was that it freed up my academic writing style and made me more conscious of audience, which has been especially useful now I do a lot of public events. So that’s another crossover.”
What did her students make of her other life in football?
She said: “My students wouldn’t necessarily know about it. They did know I like football in general terms. I did quite a lot of field trips with students and that’s when you get into more detailed conversations.
“I do remember being introduced at a conference in America by another professor who said ‘Tracey is also the director of a non-league football club’ and they went ‘Ooh, that’s weird’.
“So people kind of think it’s odd but they’re quite impressed in a way because it’s so different.”
