 The club is notable for now being the 3rd oldest amongst modern British university ice hockey programmes (having been founded in 1994) and for the fact that it was the first to introduce mixed gender participation into a full-contact university sport.The Wildcats operate a successful beginners' training programme to develop new players.Partially as a result of this, Newcastle University was the most represented institution in terms of player registration within the BUIHA for three seasons with the Wildcats preferring to ice teams consisting almost totally of Newcastle students and mostly shunning the popular practice of pooling players from the maximum possible number of institutions.