Ruck, Dave

IT WAS A DEFINING MOMENT for the Knights of the NSW Super League. Boys holding their own against men to take the Minor Premiership in 1993. Next year Ruck arrived to play for the club in a reborn East Coast Super League. He scored 36 goals 25 assists in 18 games with fellow imports Rob Boldon and Darrin Vetteri. Crowds marvelled at the Ruck-Vetteri-Laing Harrow scoring romps. A playmaker and stand-in coach in 1995, he was a shining light for the Knights, fuelling one of the most destructive lines in the League.

Born November 6th 1969 in Surrey BC, he is a 170 cm, 92 kg Centre who started hockey at home at 2, and rose to Canadian Junior A hockey for the Chilliwack Eagles in the British Columbia Junior Hockey League. After the Eagles folded, he played Junior B with the Coquitlam Warriors and was MVP of the West Coast Junior League, today’s Pacific Junior Hockey League.

He moved to Western Australia and joined the West Coast Flyers in the WA Super League with Stan Scott, Sam Wilson and Ric del Basso. League Top Scorer five times (2000, ’01, ’03, ’04 and ’07), he averaged almost 3 points a game until he retired as a player in 2015. At 40, he represented his State in the 2009 Centenary of the Goodall Cup in Adelaide.

He played the Perth Thunder exhibition games in 2011, won that year’s Brown Trophy as Top Scorer with Most Goals, and took the State Peewees to Canada. The next year at 42, he was a foundation player with the Thunder in the club’s first AIHL season, producing 35 points from 80 games, an average of 0.44 points per game. "It is brilliant that Western Australia will now have the opportunity to thrash the rest of the country in yet another field," the Member for Jandakot, Joe Francis, told the Parliamentary Assembly.

In 2014, he coached the local Barbarians and was appointed Assistant Coach of the State Brown Trophy team. The next year he played in the inaugural Ultimate Ice Hockey Championship tournament as Alternate Captain of the Northern Stars, captained and coached the team in 2016, and coached the Southern Suns in the same tournament in 2017.

Head Coach of the Perth Thunder in 2017, after a year in retirement, he said "As a foundation player I can say with confidence I have as big a drive as anyone to get the team that elusive first Goodall Cup." Voted AIHL Coach of the Year by clubs in his rookie season, he runs hockey clinics in the Perth pre-season, and is Head Coach of the 2017-18 edition of the Perth Sharks in the Australian Junior Ice Hockey League (U21).

This long, drawn-out love affair with ice hockey, across age bands, states and whole continents, is fast approaching its fiftieth year.