Green, Steve

BORN IN AUSTRALIA IN 1960, he attended Doonside High in Sydney's west where he was a natural at sport. He played soccer and cricket and first went ice skating at the Homebush rink in the early-1970s. Taken with the ice, he began figure skating classes, but it was ice hockey that captured his imagination and he quickly found his way into the Winfield Lions, home to players such as Sandi Logan and Kevin Price. He made the cut for the state Under-21 Brown Team in his first year, coached by Noel Taylor and managed by Sub Majsay. They competed against teams from Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia during the years over-age players were permitted in some interstate squads. Queensland and SA played 3 while WA with a small rink were all over-age, with lots of ex-Canadians. It was 1980, the year WA won it's first Brown Trophy defeating Victoria in the final, 5-0.

He was among the first to skate at the new Blacktown International Ice Arena in 1979 having played with the Canterbury Lions from about 3 years before competition hockey got going there. In 1981 he established the Blacktown women's ice hockey team, the first in the state since the 1920s. Beginning with a hockey school, it built into a nucleus of girls from a local school where the game was a school sport, along with others from Blacktown Girls High. He coached the team of about one dozen players with Chris Pett. It was beginner standard but improving and included young women such as Wendy Ovenden, Gail Kennedy and minder Karen Somerville who could block shots. They scrimmaged among themselves and occasionally traveled to Queensland to play the only other girls teams in the sport. This team led to the first women's league over a decade later. By the mid-1980s he was coach of the Canterbury Flames and renamed Sydney Royals women's team .

Also in the early-1980s, he established the first Blacktown men's hockey team which was later taken over by John Wilson. He managed it with local know-how on the eve of the NSW Super League at a time when teams were formed and managed by overseas arrivals. He recruited skilled players and coaches from abroad to produce a competitive squad. Notable Blacktown alumni include former captain of Australia, Anthony Wilson, and the AIHL's Scott Stephenson and David Dunwoodie. He represented his state in the Goodall Cup that year which was won by Victoria at Skateworld on the Gold Coast. Selected for a national team in later years, he fell ill and did not travel.

After a 2-year break racing go-carts on a national circuit, he returned to Blacktown for a few games then played non-contact hockey. Sandi Logan arranged permission for him to also play contact hockey with the Sydney Icemen when the club lost an import player to life suspension. Later he played with the Canterbury Icemen and the Penrith Phantoms and today he is still playing recreation hockey in the Northwest League Division 2 and veteran hockey with the Sydney Dinosaurs in the old timer's network. His mother who always went to watch him play is now 94, but his wife Deb and daughter Emma enjoy the tournament trips. His playing career is now approaching 40 years.

"Sandi Logan and George Kenny gave me a lot of inspiration in the beginning," he said recently. "I guess they could see my raw love of the game... I owe them both a lot". Logan pointed out that "without the Steve Greens of this world, we'd never have started hockey in Blacktown, notwithstanding we had a rink there for a while". Wendy Ovenden added: "Who knows, women's hockey may have died for those few years. Instead you held us up and kept us alive".