St Andrews students honoured by elite programme selection

Raph Robeson and Newburgh's Emily Dark are both students at the University of St Andrews. Pic by Ed Broughton

Dark, from Newburgh, is one of two University of St Andrews students picked to be part of the initiative.

The other is Raph Robeson from Guildford in Surrey with the two among only 29 players to be selected from across the home nations.

The elite development programme is designed to give those identified as having the potential to perform at the highest level an environment in which they can develop the skills, physicality and character required to become a medal-winning Olympian.

Players will attend a series of two-day training camps and will be in regular contact with the senior squads through training sessions and practice matches.

Emily, a fourth-year physics student, said: I’m delighted and honoured to be selected again for the GB elite development squad and I’m looking forward to getting started. I’d also like to thank the University for their continued support.”

Meanwhile Raph, a first-year international relations and economics student, said she was “really excited” to be part of the programme and that it had been something she has been working towards since she started playing the sport.

Both players already have a strong pedigree in international hockey, with Emily having been selected as a travelling reserve for the full senior GB women’s hockey team against the Netherlands and Belgium in 2020, and Raph playing for the England U16 and U18 teams from 2017 to 2020, competing against Holland, Belgium, Germany and Ireland.

Dark, who plays her club hockey for Watsonians Hockey Club in Edinburgh, is a Scottish senior women’s hockey internationalist, part of the performance hockey programme at the University of St Andrews and has won the Chancellor’s award for sporting excellence for the last two years.

She is also a Scottish Institute supported athlete with 23 Scotland senior women’s hockey team caps.

Robeson won the England Hockey Investec Women’s League Conference East with Wimbledon Hockey Club in 2020 and took the U18 Hockey writers’ club award for outstanding contribution to hockey in 2019.