Theobald, Terry

BORN TERENCE MARK THEOBALD on August 4th 1959, the son of Pam and Eric Theobald, Hakoah #6, and brother of Tony. His father won the 1963 Australian Club Championship with Hakoah, the club that traces its bloodline to the record-breaking VIHA Raiders of the Fifties. Theobald started hockey at St Moritz Ice Palais in St Kilda in 1967. "I can remember being on the bench and skating with Dad when I was 7, 8, 9 years-old as a mascot for Hakoah down at St Moritz before games...that was pretty exciting. That was huge when you were a 7 year-old kid. I remember sitting at home actually watching my Dad play hockey on TV which made me feel like he was a celebrity...every week, every Tuesday night".

He entered competition hockey when he was 10, a junior league for Hakoah in 1969, the year before the Olympic ice rink opened at Oakleigh, playing every 4 or 5 shifts. He made his first state team as a junior in 1972, played the Tange series in the years he was eligible, and played with the Bombers in an impressive line-up that included Doug Stevenson, Geoffrey Moss and Garry Mussett.

He played his first Brown Trophy as a senior in 1977, and continued in every tournament through to about 1981, twice as captain and twice as alternate. He won the Brown Trophy in Queensland in 1978 when he was in his late-twenties, coached by former NHL Philadelphia Flyer, Mike Boland and Robbie Stevenson, with Doug Stevenson, John Ekberg and Richard Motteram.

Also that year, he joined his father Eric in the Oakleigh Aces with Paul Watson, Ron Sullivan, Ian Holmes, Danny McIvor, Graham Argue and Boland. "As a mentor, Dad was a very hard coach, yelling and a screaming type coach, and a "get out there and do it" type coach and "don't take that off them" sort of coach. You knew you either gave it all, or you were going to get it all".

In 1979, he coached the Olympic Hakoah Junior A team to the Eric Charman Memorial Trophy, and repeated the feat in 2001 with the Melbourne Jets. Also in 1979, he was part of the successful Victorian Tange Trophy campaign in Newcastle. He played in the 1980 Hakoah State Premiership team captained by his father, and against the NIHL Sydney All-Stars with the Aces, coached by Barry Koski and captained by Kevin Touzon, in the televised Trail Blazers tour.

In 1981, he played the second season of the NIHL for the Oakleigh Golds coached by Roy Sargent and trained by Max McKowen. Also that year he was a player with the Dandenong Cougars Senior A team with his father — part of the state's one-team, one rink season — many of whom made their way to the NIHL and Super League of 1982 and '83. In 1986, he was among the National Senior Team squad in the friendship series against the touring Burnaby Beavers from Canada, a warm-up for the C-Pool Worlds in Spain coached by David Fehily and Charles Naish.

A Life Member of the Melbourne Jets in 2017, he joined father (1978) and brother (2015, with Patti Green and Helen and Dereck Howells), on the Club honour roll. In 2018, Theobald had played the eighteenth Most Games in Victorian hockey. On Sunday May 13th 2018, he played his 439th senior game (Senior D), equalling his father's record, with his daughter Veronica (who plays) and grandson Noah Eric watching on. Also present were his mother, Pam, and sister Robyn. Son-in-law Craig Ryan, husband of Veronica, played alongside Terry. In 2019, Veronica was president of the Melbourne Jets.

This family tradition of hockey is one thing, as are Theobald's contributions to the hockey clinics and rink initiatives of Jonathan Cornford's AIS and Joey Hughes' Next Level Hockey in Melbourne. But perhaps most significant, are Theobald's 50-odd years of involvement with the Melbourne Jets Ice Hockey Club and its predecessors, as a player, coach and official. "One night at 2 am after training," he told Jun Bastoni recently, "a friend and I were talking over a few beers on his porch, and that's how the Jets were born". The Melbourne Jets won the state league in their first season in 1995.

Terry Theobald also played veteran hockey with the Melbourne Nite Owls, and is the owner-operator of Today Electrical.