Lincolnshire Bombers

Did You Know?

• The Lincolnshire Bombers Youth team, ages 14–19, began operating in the 2015 season under the stewardship of club founder Iain Bushell.
• The Bombers U17 side became North East champions in 2016 and qualified for the national play-offs.
• Former head coach Tony Hughes was inducted into the Bombers Hall of Fame in 2014.

History

American football in Lincolnshire got its start in the early 1980s, with the Scunthorpe Steelers, Boston Blitz, and Lincoln Bombers among the first teams in the county. The landscape shifted in the 1990s after Scunthorpe folded. The Lincoln Bombers rebranded as the Lincoln Saints, and in 1993 they won the BNGL First Division title. Meanwhile, the Boston and South Lincs Blitz merged with clubs in King's Lynn and Peterborough to create the North Sea Hurricanes.

Both the Saints and the Hurricanes were gone by the mid-1990s, but youth football survived through the Haven/UCLA club in Boston and the Lincoln/Doncaster partnership that formed the UDL Longhorns. The Lincoln Saints, which grew out of the original Bombers, competed in the British National Gridiron League from 1992 to 1993. Their biggest achievement came in the 1993 BNGL First Division Bowl, where they defeated Redbridge Fire 51-14. At the turn of the millennium, the Haven/UCLA program moved into senior football and became the East Midland Saxons.

After losing their facilities in 2002, the Saxons spent two seasons in Spalding before reorganising and relocating to Peterborough. By 2005, Lincolnshire had no gridiron presence at all. That changed when Iain Bushell, a former player for the Manchester Titans and Teesside Cougars, moved to Lincoln and decided to bring the sport back. He chose to revive the Bombers name, a nod to the county's strong ties to the Royal Air Force and his own connections to RAF Waddington.

Nigel Smith, a former kicker for both the Bombers and Saints, gave him an early hand. Bushell then brought in Pat Megginson, who had been general manager and head coach of the Haven/UCLA and East Midland Saxons programs and was ready for a new challenge after leaving the Peterborough-based Saxons. The squad grew with players like Ian Askew and Neil Armitage, who had played for the Nottingham Caesars and as Lincoln juniors, along with Nige Epton, Mat Dean, and Chris Henry from the Haven/UCLA and East Midland Saxons.

Off the field, former Saints coach Tony Hughes, Herts University player-coach Jeremy Brown, Dale Bridges, and David Quincey—who returned to the sport from the old Boston Blitz—added strength, supported by a professional management team. Today, the Bombers draw members from towns across the whole county.

Name

The team's name comes from "Bomber County," a World War II nickname for Lincolnshire due to its many Royal Air Force and USAAF bomber bases. Originally called the Lincoln Bombers, the team changed its name to the Lincolnshire Bombers before learning if it had been accepted into the BAFL for 2007. The switch was made to gain media coverage across the whole county and to better represent the various hometowns of the players.