History of Ice Hockey in Queenstown....

Ice skating has been popular in the Queenstown area since the early 1900s. During the 1930s there were very severe winters and it was common for Moke Lake and Lake Dispute to freeze over with fifteen centimetres of ice. The Park Pond, which is near the present ice rink, also used to freeze over for two months each winter.

From around 1935 Lloyd Veint from Queenstown was contacted by Percy White from the Invercargill and Gore ice skating rinks on Friday nights to check on the local ice conditions. If they were favourable Percy would arrange buses to bring skaters to Queenstown for Saturday and Sunday. In 1938 Lloyd and a number of other Queenstown people formed the Queenstown Winter Sports Club. Llyod recalls that there were games of ice hockey at this time but that these were played on open ice and very much as social games.

The first artificial ice rink in Queenstown was opened in 1966 and the manager was Eoin Buckley. The freezing plant was from an old freezing works and had been used for other ice rinks before being sent to Queenstown. It had no automatic start up so Eoin had to start and reset the plant each time there was a powere failure. This was a common occurrence in Queenstown at that time and Eoin had to sleep at the rink in the school holidays to restart and maintain the plant so the ice was retained.

The Queenstown Ice Skating Club was established and incorporated in 1968. This club which included figure skating, speed skating and ice hockey wasstarted by Kath Craven, Diane Buckley, Gill Harvey and Margaret Mills.

During the 10 years the first ice rink was open the big matches were local clashes between the Queenstown Rangers and the Arrowtown Arrows. Often the public seating was full and the noise of the crowd could be heard at Fernhill which is 5 kms away. Queenstown had a strong local team at this time and won the Erewhon Cup and was placed second in the national club championships. The team at this time was coached by Bernie Graf and captained by Keith Ponder. The core of the team were: Brett and Bruce Mills, Michael Graf, Dean and Richard Lewis, Jean-Pierre Arnold, Stephen Harvey and Malcolm and Ian Craven.

The present Queenstown Ice Rink is situated on he site of the old rink in the Queenstown Gardens. Queenstown teams compete in the Southern Ice Hockey League Competition and have representatives in the Ice Blacks (national mens team), the Ice Fernz (national womens team) as well as age group teams for men and women.