SENGOTTA, Alfred Henry

BORN OCTOBER 27TH 1921 in British Columbia, Canada, Al Sengotta played Left Wing for the Vernon Bombers in the British Columbia Junior League, making the 1938-9 playoffs. He visited Australia with the Mercantile Marines during the war. The wartime clashes between Miklos Sandor of the St Moritz Bombers and Sengotta with the Glaciarium Rangers led commentators to remark the game had seldom been played so well. Miklos was brilliant in his first season at St Moritz, but by 1949 Sengotta's teammates were singing the praises of the big Canadian.

Al returned to Melbourne in 1946 to marry Olga Saima Hotanen and settle down. Local clubs of the time were benefiting from the arrival of players from Europe, including displaced refugees from the war. A foundation player with the VIHA Tigers in 1947, he was named the St Moritz ice rink's Best and Fairest.

In 1948, he joined the breakaway Victorian Ice Hockey League as foundation captain and coach of the Golden Bears. Shifting himself to defense, where he could better direct the plays, his coaching had a big influence on young speedsters such as Geoff Henke, John Slater, John Purcell and Stewart Binnie. Thanks to Sengotta, the young Bears drew with the Wildcats in the Grand Final that season, each team scoring a goal. Although the Wildcats won the second replay 4-2 before 1700 fans, the Bears were unlucky not to win their first Gange Trophy. Sengotta had done wonders with the young team, personally averaging 1.7 points a game while leading and coaching.

Sengotta "possesses perhaps the most accurate shot in Australian ice hockey," wrote Ron Casey, placing him on the left wing of Percy Wendt, with Jim McLauchlain on the right, in the first All-Australian Ice Hockey Team in 1948. "He is also a heady player and seems an ideal companion for the scintillating play of Wendt. Sengotta also knows how to back check and plays position to a tea". [3] In 1949, he took the Bears to their first VIHL premiership.

In their third season in 1950, Al again took the Bears past the Blackhawks to the state VIHL finals against the almost unbeatable Raiders. Again unsuccessful, the Bears were disbanded when the VIHL merged with the association for the 1951 season, and Sengotta joined the Blackhawks. In 1955, he won his first state premiership with the 'Hawks, the Kleiner Trophy, then defeated the Prague Bombers 8-4, in the inaugural Australian Club Championship. It was the club's second Kleiner Trophy, and the first of four straight victories that set a state record, played out by an otherwise locally-developed line-up that included the very talented Dave Cunningham, Keith Jose, Ken Wellman and Noel Derrick. He played his last season in 1956.

Sengotta played his first Goodall Cup series representing Victoria after the war in 1947, and went on to win the coveted trophy four times (1947, '51, '52, '53). One of the older players in the 1947 squad, most of whom were in their early twenties, it is doubtful he played more than a hundred games in Victoria. But he was an important role model for the new generation of post-war youngsters. Claude Hamil, a former coach of Belgium, rated the 1952 Victorian forward line of Russ Jones, Al Sengotta and David Cunningham "equal to any in Europe."

Al passed the Post Master General's test for appointment as a comms technician in 1953. [2] He died in Melbourne at 85, on May 20th 2006, survived by his wife Olga who died a few weeks later, son Robert Gregory, and daughter Wendy. [1]