FULLER HAMLETS SOCCER CLUB:
a brief history

1969-2005

The origins of the Fuller Hamlets Soccer Club go back to 1969 when children from the Fuller Road neighborhood in Sutton came to watch adult games at Fuller Field and asked if they could play. Neighborhood youth teams played in informal leagues by 1971, and in 1972 the first youth soccer team in Worcester County history—the Fuller Hamlets U-11 Boys—joined the Pioneer Soccer League in the Boston Metro Area to get games and, incidentally, to win the Pioneer League Championship. Youth league soccer came to Worcester County in 1973 and for the next 16 years Hamlets teams so dominated the Worcester County (WCYS) and Midland Area (MAYS) leagues that they won 75% of all county championships. During these years the club founded pee-wee (5-8 yrs) soccer in Worcester County in 1977, and committed itself to girls soccer, forming the first girls soccer league in Central Massachusetts in 1978 and was the prime mover in forming the first Girls League in 1982 and the successor Greater Worcester Girls Soccer League in 1983.

Long committed to the idea of a statewide premier league the Fuller Hamlets was a founding member of the National Challenge Cup League (NCCL) in 1987, and successor the Massachusetts Premier League in 1994 and thereafter dropped out of the county wide leagues. The Fuller Hamlets S.C. is today the oldest and longest-lived youth soccer club playing in the Massachusetts Premier League (MAPLE) and has won 59 Massachusetts state cup and league championships at all ages from U11 to U19. In all but three years 1989-2005 the record of Fuller Hamlets teams has ranked us first, second, or third in the state. Our state champions and our other successful senior teams have consistently sent the majority of their players to the best College programs which have supported these players with literally millions of dollars. At the last count our players were voted "All-American" at either High school or college level 25 times, and three have played for U.S. national teams. In the club's most recent determination to give our best players the highest level of competition and the chance for Eastern U.S. exposure to college coaches the Hamlets have united with four other prominent Mass Premier clubs as the Black Watch Alliance to send teams to the Super Y League finals(2005).

The three bases of the club's recent successes are (1) the Hamlets Wanderers program in its tenth year; (2) the Hamlets Soccer Camp in its twentieth year; and (3) outright ownership/control of the Bowden A & B, Hassett, and Fuller Fields. Each year the Hamlets Wanderers program takes 65 to 100 x 7 to 9-year-olds with potential and trains them in fundamental skills and the 11-a-side game at the Wanderers Training Facility at Fuller Field (with scrimmages under the lights at the Bowden A & B fields). The outdoor program runs August-November and April-June and the indoor program January to March. Most Hamlets players, some as teams, attend at least one week of Hamlets Soccer Camp, July-August (ratio 1 coach to 8 campers or better). Our greatest club-owned assets are the Bowden A & B fields with floodlights and irrigation (1980-82), the superbly-drained 5-acre Hassett practice field at Sutton Square/Boston Road (1984), and the 4-acre Fuller Road facility owned by the Bowden family (1969). For further info. See Martyn J. Bowden, Hamlets: A History & Geography... 1969- 1989, Sutton: Putnam House, 1990, 200pp. & J. & S. Le Claire, A Century of Sutton Sports, Sutton: Sutton Foundation, 2004, pp. 109,165,185-187.