Gifts That Keep Giving

Kathy Berg and open-hearted heroism

My coaching philosophy never changes — it is to get the absolute best out of every player. To help them become a complete athlete. Give them the tools they need. If I can provide a great learning experience for a player, and they leave the game becoming a great person and leader, then I did my job. I look at most of our past Australian Team and am so very proud of not just who they are, but what they have become.

It was truly my favourite assignment.

— Kathy Berg, 2018. Foundation Head Coach, Australian National Women's Team (1999-2006) [11]

Australian National Women's Team, IIHF Division III World Championships, Maribor, Slovenia 2001. Courtesy Kathy Berg. [11]

YOUNG WOMEN TOOK TO ICE HOCKEY in Australia soon after the first indoor rinks opened in Melbourne and Sydney in 1906 and '07. Their first interstate series, which began in a shower of postwar champagne and ragtime in 1922, disappeared into the hardship and gloom of the Great Depression. By the time women returned to the sport in the Sixties, it was hard going just crossing the moat of the all-male citadel. And if you did somehow cross, you played in junior boys teams because there was still no female league in any Australian city by the time Canada held its first national women's ice hockey championship in 1982.

But that year, Chris Pett and Steve Green formed a women's team at the new Blacktown ice rink in Sydney and, the next season, a group of female figure skaters formed the Mumma Bears ice hockey team in the Australian Capital Territory. By 1984, a total of sixty women played ice hockey, two percent of all players, and the year after that, young women wielding hockey sticks spread across four states. A female league planned for Australia's bicentenary in 1988 did not happen, but six years later Terry Jones created the first state ice hockey league for women while his daughter Ellen was finishing up with the Peewees. [4] Played on prime-time ice in winter, and often either side of Super League games, it was also the first women's league in Australia.

More followed in other states, turning women's ice hockey into a well-recognised sport in the 1990s, pushed and prodded along by the exciting new wave of popular sporting culture — especially the Mighty Ducks movie, and the entry of women's ice hockey to the Olympics. Jones helped Jenny Dodd, Wendy Ovenden and Chris Pett set up the Able Press Cup in 1994, without subsidy or even support from the state association. The first national women's tournament sprang up the next year, bold and triumphant, the Joan McKowen Trophy, its namesake an icon of local women's and men's ice hockey.

When Terry Jones became Australia's first National Women's Development Director in the mid 1990s, he pushed hard for women's hockey to take that next step to the World Championships. [7] Then, one day, he contacted the Director of the International Female Hockey Program at the Olympic Oval in Canada. [1]

A MYRIAD OF TINY SPARKS shoots up from the giant log as it joins the bonfire, followed by squeals of laughter from the circle of wide-eyed youngsters. Our skin glows red, yellow and gold, and tiny pictures of that great fire flicker in our eyes. Roasted one side, frozen the other, like the marshmallows on sticks in the pit for the s'mores, we are at one with the frozen prairie. The smell of paraffin mingled with smoke. The hiss of damp wood and blades on ice. The spray of snow in the pale dawn light. No solitary scene on Earth can prepare Australian ice hockey players for the enormity of what they're up against internationally. But, this is a piece of that intricate tapestry.

Kathy Berg was born in 1960 in Vermilion, [3] where Yellowhead Highway and Buffalo Trail intersect, 192 km east of Edmonton. But she lived In Marwayne, a village of a few hundred houses, 21 km from where Lloydminster straddles the provincial border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. The townsfolk of one of the best ranching and farming districts in western Canada seem to regularly court and dodge disaster — the windstorm that blew over granaries and train cars in '49, the fire that blazed down Center Street in '54 leaving the Post Office and hotel standing, the blizzard in '55 with one to two metre drifts, another fire in '73 that burned three elevators on Railway Avenue, and of course a flood in '86.

Outdoor rinks are a mainstay in Marwayne. The Fire Department still install the ice at West Wind Park behind the Manors, and volunteers still bring their own wood for the fire pit when they remove the snow. In winter, the volunteer-run arena is home to the town's skating clubs and Minor Hockey Association. (The Professional Bull Riders rodeo arrives in April). Everyone plays pond hockey and street hockey. Lots of low-cost fun.

Organised ice hockey for women was really just beginning in the Seventies, and Berg considered herself lucky to live in a place with a couple of women's leagues to play in. The youngest of Lloyd and Iona Berg's six children, she had three brothers and two sisters. Bob and Pat enjoyed the game and were a definite influence, all three moving on to organised hockey. Berg played in the A-league, sometimes as alternate captain early on, and often against the Edmonton Chimos who dominated most of their encounters. The Chimos were a force in Canada, and one day they recruited Berg to play with them.

In those years, teams competed for the right to represent at the Western Canadian Shield. It was the highest level of competition until major sponsors stepped in and funded the Canadian National Championships in 1982, around the time Berg came of age. Every female hockey player aspired to play for the Abbey Hoffman Cup, the Canadian symbol of national women's hockey supremacy.

"The East had some very good teams," recalls Berg. "The Toronto Aeros were a huge competitor. We all gave so much throughout the year to be the best team we could be. We had to think outside the box". They left the women's league and challenged themselves playing against men's old-timer teams across the province. "We would have a 60-game schedule for the year. Sometimes we would play four games in a weekend". They paid for everything out of their own pockets — ice, meals, travel, practices.

Berg won the silver in 1982 and '83, and finally the Abbey Hoffman Cup in 1984. [2] "It was truly an honour to represent Alberta because it was a battle to win Provincials," she says. "To win the National Championship — the best team in Canada — was an honour". The Chimos went on to become the dominant women's team in Alberta, capturing all but one provincial championship from 1982 to 1997.

Then, in her mid-Twenties, a serious car accident left her with extensive injuries to her left hand. At some point during the many surgical procedures and the long recovery, it dawned on her. She could not play anymore. "I loved female hockey," she said, "and if I couldn't play, coaching was the next best option".

Over eighty-five thousand women play hockey in Canada today, a seventeen-fold increase over the five thousand registrations in the early Eighties. [2] It could take several years to do each level of the NCCP coaching program back then, depending on where you were in the system. Berg started between 1990 and '94 while coaching girls in the Peewee to Midget age bands of minor hockey. She then made the move to Senior Women's Hockey and successfully ran a female hockey school with Shannon Miller. They coached the Calgary Classics women's team, winning the Western Canadian Shield Senior A Championship.

Six years later, they moved the school to the University of Calgary where the Olympic Oval International Female Hockey Program began in 1995. Berg implemented the Midget training program there, and joined Team Alberta as a coaching assistant for the Canada Winter Games. She became director of the Olympic Oval program in 1997, and coached the province's Under-18 Female Team in the first Canadian National Midget tournament.

Berg considered herself very fortunate to coach alongside Shannon Miller... also Wally Kozak and Tomas Pacina — "both outstanding coaches and mentors". [2] While Miller coached the Canadian national women's team — gold at the 1997 Worlds, silver at the first women's ice hockey Olympics — Berg took the University's women's team, the Dinos, to bronze at the first ever CIAU Canada West University Female Hockey Tournament.

The Olympic Oval venue is a legacy of the 1988 Olympic Winter games. Oval X-Treme and the university's Dino Varsity Team were two of the program's three teams, along with the Oval Lightning, a farm team created to give more athletes the opportunity to compete. Many Canadians came to train as well as players from other countries: Finland, Germany, China, Japan, France, Switzerland, and Australia. If eligible, they made a team.

That year, Kozak, Berg and Sandy Johnson coached the Oval X-Treme to the Alberta AAA Provincial Championship and the National title. Coaching victory felt different to playing for Berg. The game had grown so much by then. The competition was higher. Players were now athletes, their commitment at its highest. Putting together a team while training for eleven months was like solving a puzzle for her. From coaching staff to support staff, to the athlete selection showcase of the year's work. Not everyone who trained in the Oval Program made the Oval X-Treme team. It was a battle for them to make that team.

A single program emphasizing training all year round is almost unheard of in the sport, but Berg led it for a remarkable thirteen years, steering female hockey up to a new level. "We took hockey players and turned them into athletes — complete players," she said. "We hired a team of experts: physiologists, sports psychologists, nutritionists, and of course the best of coaches. We had two training groups that trained daily. A Gold group and a Silver group. Athletes moved in and out of these groups based on their performance".

Destined to win the national twice more — in 2001 as Coach, and 2007 as General Manager — Berg's career total is six. The economic downturn in 2008 forced many high performance sport programs and venues to close. Berg's was one of them.



"I APPROACHED MY BOSS, the GM of the Olympic Oval," recounts Berg, talking about the time Terry Jones first made contact in the late Nineties. "There was no hesitation, our mandate was to help the game grow nationally and internationally. The more countries that played and excelled, the better it was for the game". It was demanding fitting it all in, but she says she was fortunate to have a team of coaches that she "could and would shuffle" to work with Australia.

At that time, she juggled the responsibilities of Head Coach of the Dinos, Assistant Coach of the Alberta Provincial Women's Team, and an undergraduate of the National Coaching Institute at the University. All Oval coaches — speed skating, cycling or hockey  had to attend the Institute, along with many others from national sporting organisations. Berg thought herself lucky that Sport Canada had a spot where she worked at the University of Calgary, an Olympic facility. Most coaches took two years to do the program because they had full-time coaching careers. But the training was definitely beneficial, she said, delivered by the best professionals, and colleagues from other sports.

Starting the NWT program was a huge task in Australia. Berg did not have a deep pool of players to draw from, and so their ages spread wide, so too their skill-levels. Just learning the game and its various systems was an obstacle, as was nutrition for performance, and even the thrill of playing in a World Championship, because some players had not travelled before.

On the upside, Berg had some great assistant coaches along with a few older players who were natural leaders and eager to lend a hand. She needed all of them, she said, because she could never have gotten the team as far as it went without players such as Steph Wheaton, Miri Hamilton, Cathy Wilkinson, Melissa Rulli, Mellisa Bibby, Amanda Fenton, Kaylee Reitsma, Candice Mitchell and others. Without them, the program may not have survived the early years.

The first camp for team selection stretched over twenty-one days at the Canterbury ice rink [7] in Sydney, with only a half-day off. Three weeks of 30-plus temperatures and twenty-one ice sessions, team building, training, class sessions... the lot. Terry Jones took her for a break to the Blue Mountains, both insolent all the way. Berg shared every aspect of her experiences training the best players in Canada, and implemented a comprehensive program of personal skill and tactical development, nutrition planning, mental toughness training, decision training, and video analysis.

She tested progress regularly to find focus areas for strength training, using the same protocols she used in Canada. And because it was Australia's first national team for women, a tabula rasa, she knew she could set the bar high. And she did, because the squad could not be competitive unless its players grew stronger and fitter. They responded well by working very hard. "I have never been more proud of a group of players — ever. Thinking back just makes me smile. The players worked so hard, they learned so much and they represented their country so well".

Steph Boxall (Wheaton) remembers Berg picked twenty girls from the thirty-five or so at the camp to play in the qualification-level championship. "We were hooked on Berg's professionalism and enthusiasm from day one," says Boxall, who captained the team. "Players played for her and never wanted to disappoint". [7] They had made a beginning, but a lot more work followed over the course of the year with the help of an "amazing staff".

Scott Wilson trained the players and kept them together through competitions. Berg says she owes him a great deal of gratitude because he was probably the biggest reason for their success. Nutrition needed some attention, so Jo Wilson came onboard as Team Nutritionist in the first couple of years. And good management: Terry Jones, Ron Wilson, "the great Rocky Padjen" and, of course, Subby Majsay who led the way as chef-de-mission.

While at home, Berg shared the Team Playbook with coaches back in Australia, so they could continue working with the squad throughout the year on skill development, team play, and systems. It was all so new for them. Scott worked with the team year round to get them fitter and stronger. Preparing Australia for the Worlds was like starting the season over, because the timing of the Championships did not marry well with the local competition season. So, Berg planned more selection camps, as many as the budget allowed.

"She is the kind of coach who helps you clear a path to the water, so to speak," says Tamra Jones, one of Berg's coaching assistants on the Australian National Women's Team from 2001. "She motivates you to better yourself and your teammates around you. She is a big believer in teaching decision-making and getting players to take responsibility, to 'buy-in' to the unique opportunities being offered. It is then up to each player and the team to bind together and keep taking drinks. And we all did, time and time again". [5]

The groundwork for the first international trip was laid out over the rest of that year. Aside from hockey, there were more big barriers to consider: language, food, culture, just to name a few. The staff was fantastic — Sunny and Terry Jones led the way. "It was a learning curve for all involved and playing in two different towns added to the journey. All in all, it proved to the team that they could compete". If you've ever led a team, you may appreciate it is as much an art as science, perhaps more. Because science and things like peak physical condition can at least be measured and solved, but there are still no precise instruments for shaping the heart and soul of high performance.

They skated on to the world stage at the dawn of the new millenium in the Pool B Qualification tournament in Dunaujvaros and Szekesferhevar, Hungary. At stake was the right to take part in the World Championships in Maribor Slovenia the next year. Their first game was a 2-0 loss to Netherlands, followed by losses to Great Britain, 7-1, and North Korea, 8-1.

It was tough going, but then they shutout South Africa, 6-0, and beat New Zealand, 2-1. They beat South Africa 6-0 in the game for seventh place, and they were first overall for Fair Play with an average of six penalty minutes per game. Of the eight competing teams, only North Korea qualified. "We had much more "buy-in" from that point moving forward," notes Berg. [1] The next year, Team Australia returned to the qualification pool in Maribor, and finished in 3rd place behind Slovakia and Great Britain who qualified for Division 2.

In 2003, Australia once again found itself back in Maribor, but this time in a new Division 3. [6] That year, before Berg co-created the Western Women's Hockey League with Dee Bateman in Canada and acted as president, she led the Australian women to a IIHF Gold Medal, and promotion to Division 2. It took more skill to win the Gold, and "We were prepared," she says. "The returning core of players and staff knew what it would take, not just to compete, but to win Gold". They were also much fitter, stronger and faster. Much more mentally tough.

Tamra Jones will tell you Berg is good at motivating young girls to push themselves, challenge themselves and believe they can do what may otherwise seem impossible. The gold in Slovenia in 2003 almost felt like that, she says. Good coaches believe in their players and teach them to believe in themselves. They inspire them to commit. "It was an unbelievable feeling in that moment," as Jones recalls, "and one I'll never forget. The closest feeling I've since had to this was as Head Coach of the Under-18 women's team when we won our first international gold medal in 2017". [5]

For eight years Berg coached Australia, from its foundation in 1999, through its first international qualifications in 2000 and 2001, to three Women's Worlds. Her term in the National Women's Program saw the Selects Team created in 2004, the year Australia was first promoted to the Division II Women's Worlds, and the Showcase Series in 2005, which offered top level female competition during the regular season of the Northern Hemisphere, so that players competed in the Worlds in peak condition.

Each state did such a great job of supporting their athletes at the National level, according to Berg. But there was still a need to have good competition year round to grow the game at a higher level. "I think they have done a great job with the AWIHL. It can only continue to grow".

Melissa Bibby and Candice Mitchell competed in all five of Berg's internationals. Steph Wheaton, Kaylee Reitsma, Anna Potter, Melissa Rulli and Amanda Fenton played four. Berg says they each sacrificed so much to represent their country on the international stage. "The cost was absolutely unbelievable, and they used all their holidays for camps and competition. I truly can't say enough about them — so much character. I'm so very proud and honoured to have coached them".

THE YOUNGER GIRLS didn't know much about the new Coach, but there was a buzz among the older players, and soon enough, they found themselves watching the sunset with one of the most extraordinary women's ice hockey coaches alive. That's where you and I come in, because Berg built teams here in Australia that she says are among her favourite works. I've been trying to understand those teams for almost ten years. I learned from them what you learn from all Berg's work, that love is a form of reciprocity, at times even a barter economy. Kathy Berg's gift was so divine it remade the hockey space around her.

It's no small burden to possess something as valuable as Berg's talent for inspiring others. A car accident meant this young woman from the Canadian prairie would be in the coaching world early, whether she liked it or not. She went on to coach the Calgary Oval X-Treme, the crown jewel of the women's leagues for years, and the single biggest supplier of talent to Canada's national team.

When Berg accepted a role as the first coach of the Australian women's National hockey team, the mission was to help them gain entry to the IIHF World Championships, then rise in the world rankings. Some of the many challenges included very little funding and few female players with international experience. She had seen most of it before. She developed a National Team and discovered a competitive way against more experienced countries.

In many ways, Team Australia performed as expected. But it was also the most competitive practice team Berg had ever coached. Their body contact and preparedness to practice was amazing. They battled very hard in every drill. They just needed to rise up the huge learning curve and play games with the level of competitiveness they had in practice.

Berg made a new kind of Australian ice hockey, one in which young women could flower, mid-game, into heros. She did that by winning hearts. By raising the bar. By valuing mateship, professionalism, loyalty, honesty, hard work, commitment, respect and fun. By keeping the lines of communication open, and by helping everyone understand and accept their role in the team. [5] She empowered the players, says Bibby, enabling them to become autonomous thinkers on the ice. It was a good way to lead, given Berg lived in another country and her players were spread wide. [6]

Her protégés say she did more. She filled in the few time-slots left over to the leaders of groups of twenty athletes and five staff, with guidance on the crafting of the Australian NWT program. She embodied the future, reaching out beyond the first National Women's Teams, offering up a blueprint for her disciples, daring more women to rise in the sport, sometimes training her attention on a single listener in the front row, and silently raising the question of who they will become in the world.

"She accepted the challenge to develop a group of Australian ice hockey players into a team and take us to world championships," says Kaylee White (Reitsma). Kathy is a hero to many of the girls that played in the Australian team and she will always be one of my all time favourite coaches and people. She is a Legend and absolutely deserves to be recognised for the dedication and love she gave to the sport and the girls". [8]

Boxall believes her former coach inspired an "amazing trust" in what she was teaching. "The team was always proud of her as Coach, and the feeling was that we were in great hands. Her coaching legacy has continued with (Melissa) Rulli and Dawn (Watt) and Amelia (Matheson) in Newcastle coaching to high levels. I'm sure Berg had an influence there". [7]

Like others in the first teams, Tamra Jones and Berg stay in touch. Apart from their years together on the NWT, Jones spent time with Berg at overseas training camps and world championship events, and even professional development opportunities Berg created for her at the Olympic Oval. She says the coach is a "very warm-hearted, giving and loyal soul. She was, and still is, passionate about growing the game, a smooth operator with a vision to make dreams come true.

"Her investments into the Australian Women's ice hockey program continue to be layered and built upon. Kathy's legacy lives on here — it's kinda like the gift that keeps giving — as the impression she had with so many, in my opinion, has driven, what I call her disciples, to pave their own paths to support the continued development of the women's program, and its associated leagues, teams and initiatives".

Berg doesn't talk about emotional information: who controls it and how it is squandered or hoarded, witheld or weaponized. But you get the impression she could write books about it. Melissa Bibby, one of the returning core in the first campaigns in the Noughties, suggested "Gentle Jesus" for the title of her story, adding she could write a thesis on Berg's influence on the program, and herself personally. "She lives her values and she has a bull detector with a five kilometre radius". [6]

When players talk about the years they played on Berg's national squads, they smile and laugh reflecting on all the good memories they have, both on and off the ice. "Most memorable things about Berg," smiles Steph Boxall playfully, "are her love of Australia's language and lingo — and her fear of Australia's insects. Which, if you have ever done a summer camp at Warner's Bay (Newcastle), you would understand the cicada and spider issue".

Or, as Tamra Jones puts it: "I can only hope that I may similarly enrich the life experiences of some of the players I coach and other coaches I work with. This way, hopefully the gift can continue to keep on giving for decades to come". [5]




"I see it everyday in my home office," confides Coach. "It makes me proud of the program that was created. It was a lot of hard work. I got to work with some fantastic people, coaches and athletes that have become great people. As a coach that is what you hope for — that your players become great people".

"The program received great support from IHA and several Women Hockey Directors. So many people helped get this program off the ground — it was not easy. From Don Rurak with the IHA, to Terry Jones, Chris Hall, Ron Wilson, and "Rocky from hockey" Padjen, who kept it going.

"From all the coaches and assistant coaches that put in endless hours of time. Thank you. We all did it, because we loved the game. The award reminds me of my greatest memory of my coaching career".

In 2004, Berg took the Australian National Women's Team to 20th in the World, its all-time highest ranking.

In 2007, Australia's national association presented her with a Special Commendation Award. It happened to be the first year of the first national women's league, the AWIHL.

In 2018, about 600 women were registered to play ice hockey in Australia, a ten-fold increase on 1984.