Keith Burhouse and his family took supporting their local Rugby League club to a new level towards the end of the 1980s. Keith first become actively involved with Huddersfield RLFC when he answered an appeal for help to get the Fartown stadium ready to stage a John Player Trophy semi-final in the mid 1980s. He thought his skills as a maintenance engineer could prove useful to the club he had supported since boyhood. But much to his surprise, the first time he turned up to help at the ground there were no other volunteers.
This unfortunate situation was a sign of things to come. Initially, Keith spent a week’s holiday helping some of the Club’s directors to replace the West Stand roof and the stadium was passed fit by the RFL to stage the match. But the old ground had fallen into a state of chronic disrepair and over the next few years more and more of Keith’s spare time was spent on patching it up. Despite these efforts the club’s decline in fortunes continued as the decade wore on and by the late 1980s Keith was not the only member of the Burhouse family whose help had been enlisted. His wife Carol took on responsibility for catering, his father Ronald helped with ground maintenance and took charge of parking arrangements on match days, whilst his sons operated the scoreboard.
Fortunately, for both the club and the Burhouse family, help arrived in 1989 when a new board of directors took over and injected some much needed financial resources into the club. Keith continued to help out and in the same year received well deserved recognition for his efforts. He was awarded the Traveleads Top Fan award for 1989 which included an expenses paid trip to America to watch an exhibition match between Wigan and Warrington in Milwaukee, and a week long holiday in Florida.