Wellman, Ken

BORN JUNE 2ND 1930 in Melbourne Australia, he played 100 games as a foundation player of the Tigers between 1947 and 1954, winning the club's first premierships back-to-back in 1949 and 1950. In 148 games with the Blackhawks between 1955 and 1966, he won four straight premierships between 1955 and 1958, another in 1960, and two more back-to-back in 1965 and '66. Two of these were League records.

He finished his club career with the Monarchs, winning the first of three straight premierships in his first season. He was National Club Champion at least twice with the Blackhawks in 1955, and again in 1970 as Captain of the Monarchs when Ian Holmes and Ray Gerwing were Vice Captains. He may have also won this title with the successful 1965 Blackhawks, and the four straight victories produced by the Monarchs dynasty from 1967.

A stalwart of the game, he represented Victoria in the Goodall Cup, winning ten titles between 1953 and 1973 (1953 to '55; '61, '62; '66 to '68; '72, '73), all the more remarkable because his career straddled the 5-year suspension of the series between 1956 and 1960 when New South Wales was without a rink.

Vice Captain of Australia at 29 in the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley California, he captained Australia at 32 in the next international, the 1962 IIHF B-Pool World Championships in Denmark, where Australia recorded its first international win. "With my experience of the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley", he wrote in his report, "I feel that the standard of this team was more approaching the world standard and, if there could have been 4 or 5 exhibition games before the Championships, in my opinion a full team would have won at least 4 games and been much closer to winning their group". 


More than a few selected players dropped out of this squad, unable to pay the cost of about $15,000 in today's money. "No team, if possible, should travel overseas paying a proportion of their own expenses," he informed the national association after the tour. "This Association ... must commence raising money immediately to make sure that sufficient funds are available when the next team goes away and as much practice arranged as possible".

He returned to the world stage for a third time in 1963-4 with the unsuccessful Olympic Qualification Team in Tokyo, one of just three players with Rus Jones and John Thomas to represent Australia in his country's first three pioneering internationals.

In 1970, during the Defris years, he was elected Senior Vice President of his State association, with Bob Blackburn his Junior counterpart, state secretary Tony Martyr, and treasurer John McCrae Williamson. A Life Member of both state and national associations, the Ken Wellman Trophy was named in his honour in 2008, and awarded annually to the Most Valuable Player in the state's top junior league.

Ken Wellman died in Melbourne on March 21st 2013. He won his last Goodall Cup in 1973 when he was 43, falling one short of Jim Brown's record.