Celebrating a Champion I Lee Capes

The 2020 Hall of Champions inductees - WA women's Hockey players from 1985 to 1991

As part of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games team, Lee Capes scored the winning goal in the gold medal final against South Korea - securing Australia’s first gold medal in hockey Olympic history and beginning a golden era that resulted in three Olympics golds and two World Cup triumphs over 12 years.

Capes hails from an impressive hockey pedigree unlikely to be matched by many others. Her mother, June Harding, was inducted into the Hockey Australia Hall of Fame in 2018 after her contribution to hockey as a member of the Hockeyroos from 1957 to 1963. Similarly, Lee and her sister, Michelle, were recently inducted into WA’s Hall of Champions as members of the unbeatable WA team from 1985 to 1991.

Hockey runs deep in the family as Capes’ daughter, Kaitlin Nobbs, a current Hockeyroo, vies for her spot in the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games. Kaitlin’s dad, Michael Nobbs, also played in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and coached the Indian men’s hockey team at the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Capes, like her family, thrived in competitive environments and loved the challenge of chasing the win – headlined by many of her triumphs.

Leading into 1984 Olympics, WA boasted almost the full Australian Hockeyroos forward line. Gaining selection in the WA team was no easy feat, with team members forced to fight really hard to earn their black-and-gold uniform, which became almost as hard to earn the green-and-gold one. Come 1985, the start of the seven-year clean run, the WA team was made up of tough and resilient players, many of whom, including Lee, had done their time in the flanks waiting to crack the team.

The local WA competition was first class, with great competitiveness among the top teams – Pirates, Grads (now Wolves), UWA, Surf (now Raiders) and Floreat (now YMCC). They maintained a high standard of competition throughout the year, fighting tenaciously against each other, but when it was time to compete at the National Championships, they seamlessly united as one terrific unit to take on NSW and Queensland in particular - never once settling for a sub-par performance.

The WA team had wonderfully positive coaches, in particular Don Smart, an amazing player himself.

“Don always instilled in us such confidence, he had such belief in us as players and treated us with such respect”, Capes reminisces.

“We would be down, many times, sometimes by two or three goals by mid game, but always had the look in our eyes as if to say “time to raise the bar”. And we generally did.” The determination and grit from the team to never give up showed in their unbeaten record over seven years which has never been repeated by any team since.
“You wear the black and gold, you are meant to perform, and you are meant to win. That was it really.”

The team competed with a no-nonsense attitude and came together as a group who had each other’s backs… despite being at each other’s throats every now and then.

The team pushed each other to their ultimate limits but in the end not only were they fierce rivals with each other, but they continually pushed each other to be consistently the best team over a historic period in women’s hockey. The core group of players during this golden era remain life long friends and proves that quality connections are formed on and off the pitch.

Click here for the full story and list of players inducted from this team for the ages