The New Zealand’s Former Olympian Paul Ackerley expires – Hockey Update
One of the historic names for New Zealand hockey, Paul Ackerley expired on May 3 due to an illness at the Wellington Hospital. He was 61 years of age.
Ackerley was one of the squad members to bring home gold medal from the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Later, the team was given the honours of getting their names in the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame of 1990.
Ackerley then coached the women national hockey team for six years, who earned a bronze medal at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, he also gave coaching to the Wellington women hockey squad for quite some time.
Before his demise, he had been working for New Zealand’s Sport and Recreation body (SPARC) as a Senior Advisor in Coaching and Volunteers for the past seven years in Wellington.
The Chief Executive of SPARC Peter Miskimmin admitted that the deceased was highly valued among his colleagues as well as in the sport and recreation sector.
“At SPARC we have lost a much-loved colleague and friend, but Paul will also be a tremendous loss to the wider sports community. Paul had a lot of sporting success in his life. Not only was he a gold-medal winning Olympian and a high-performance coach, he
also managed to use his talents and skills to help develop other coaches,” commented Miskimmin.
The CEO shared that Ackerley was very obsessive about sport and coaching. Apart from sports, his greatest passion was his family including his wife Rosemary and daughters.
Another colleague from SPARC, John Reid, who was the General Manager of Community Sport, told that Ackerley had an experience of working with the national sports bodies in New Zealand for the development of coaching programmes in the country.
“Paul took SPARC’s national coaching strategy and developed guidelines from it which underpin the coaching programmes of most of the country’s leading sports. He had a true gift when it came to working with people. Everyone he dealt with liked him and respected
him. He was the sort of guy who would do anything he could to help you, personally and professionally,” said Reid.
In the recent years, Ackerley had worked closely with Andy Rogers, who is the Director of the Greater Auckland Coaching Unit.
According to Rogers, Paul was a very down-to-earth person and was highly regarded in the sporting sector. He was an important part of the sports community and will always be remembered.
Paul originally belonged to Ashburton and played his beginning years of hockey in Christchurch, representing the University of Canterbury Hockey Club.
He featured New Zealand’s national hockey team from 1974-1977, during which he played about 25 international caps.
He began his professional life as a teacher and simultaneously worked for the Ministry of Education and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, before joining SPARC in 2004.
Tags: