There are various sporting activities available in Haverhill, including a leisure centre (with swimming pool) , an eighteen-hole golf course , a dancing school specialising in Ballet, Modern, Tap and Acro/Gymnastics , a ten-pin bowling alley, and a snooker club. Aside from sport, the Haverhill Arts Centre features a cinema and has a varied schedule of music, drama, dance, and comedy. This facility is housed in the former town hall, a grade II listed building and opened as an arts centre in 1994.

Golf is a sport in which individual players or teams hit a ball into a hole using various clubs, and also is one of the few ball games that does not use a fixed standard playing area. It is defined in the Rules of Golf as "playing a ball with a club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules."

It is said that the first ever game of golf may have been played at the Bruntsfield Links in 1456, claimed by the history of the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, now The Royal Burgess Golfing Society.

Golf, in essentially the form we know today, has been played on Scotland's Musselburgh Links since at least 1672, while variations of the game had been played throughout the British Isles and the Low Countries of northern Europe for several centuries before that.

Hitting a golf ball

To hit the ball, the club is swung at the motionless ball on the ground (or wherever it has come to rest) from a side stance. Many golf shots make the ball travel through the air (carry) and roll out for some more distance (roll).

Every shot is a compromise between length and precision, as long shots are generally less precise than short ones. Obviously, a longer shot may result in a better score if it helps reduce the total number of strokes for a given hole, but the benefit may be more than outweighed by additional strokes or penalties if a ball is lost, out of bounds, or comes to rest on difficult ground. Therefore, a skilled golfer must assess the quality of his or her shots in a particular situation in order to judge whether the possible benefits of aggressive play are worth the risks.