In His Own Words I Ric Charlesworth

BY RIC CHARLESWORTH

The earliest of my hockey memories would involve me riding my bike to hockey training twice a week, playing games on Saturday afternoons and just being enthralled in the sport. 

It would’ve been around 1964, my last year of primary school, where I went to watch Western Australia play then Olympic Champions Pakistan at Perry Lakes Stadium – there would’ve been 10,000 people there! 

Against all odds, WA managed to pull off a famous win on the day, with Bob Andrew from my club (Cricketers Hockey Club, now Westside Wolves) scoring the goal to sink the champions. 

Beating the number one team in the world made me think, ‘boy, we’re good at this!’ 

Three days later, I got off school to go to the WACA to watch the replay, as requested by Pakistan – which they didn’t fault this time, but WA still put up a great fight. 

My love for the sport strengthened from there-on. 

Back in those days, the late 50s, 60s and 70s, all the big games were played at the WACA. 

In 1965 I played my first match there in the second-grade grand final as a replacement – this is where the fire began, and I started to take my hockey seriously. 

I progressed from there, making the State Junior team and then the Colts (Under-21), to then eventually playing my first senior game for WA in 1970 against Japan at the very stadium I watched my heroes take down the Pakistani champs – the WACA! 

I had a storied history involving Pakistan myself throughout my career. 

Hockey was so different back in my early career – I remember playing a Test match against Pakistan at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, Pakistan, which was a cricket ground at the time. 

Pakistan were playing against the West Indies in the cricket at the time at the same stadium. We ended up playing the matches on the rest days of the cricket, right next to the pitch!  

It’s a bit funny when you think about it now, considering my careers in both cricket and hockey. 

Who knows if I would have preferred cricket in the long run, all I knew is that hockey was my true love and cricket is what I did in between. 

Had I put my mind to it, I might have been a bit better at it – all my teammates would head off to England, try to earn some coin and make a career out of it, but my love for hockey was too strong. 

I feel like I can attribute a lot of my success in hockey to being in the right place at the right time – I did join a good club early! 

There were fantastic people and role models at the club and being the ‘young kid’ at the time meant that they took me under their wing. 

I remember the player I replaced in my first second-grade game was the captain of the Australian Olympic team in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics – a handy player if I do say so myself! 

I have memories of watching the 1964 bronze medal win for the Australian Men’s National Team and their finals performance in the next Olympics, with some of the players at the time being players I knew and had interactions with. 

All of this normalised things in a sense for me, it made me think “these guys are Olympians, so why can’t I do the same?” 

Four years after that, there I was in Munich, living that dream. 

Knowing these Olympic medallists, playing with and against them, getting tips from them and having this dream, it all played a part – with a lot of hard work! 

I’d say my coaching career was accidental in a sense – there was never a point early on where I thought about getting into coaching. 

I started coaching juniors at Cricketers as a 17-year-old only because it was the expectation back then. 

Coaching in the juniors eventually resulted in me coaching our A-grade side as a captain-coach which was common, as many sides didn’t see a need in splitting it into two roles. 

The State teams, however, had a designated coach - I remember a time while playing for the State team when the coach couldn’t make it at the last minute and everyone pointed to me to take the role. 

It was a pretty weird feeling, being one of the youngest in the group acting as a captain-coach when at the time a fair chunk of the playing group was over 30. 

I found it all a bit difficult, playing and coaching at the same time. When I was playing, I wanted my full focus on playing and helping my team through that aspect – not being accountable for other players’ actions. 

All of this deterred me from any thought of coaching post my playing career – my full focus and effort upon retiring was my duties in parliament. 

In 1992, I decided I would leave parliament in 1993 following the election, to pursue my career in medicine which had taken a back seat amongst all my other plans. 

It would’ve been September/October that year, I got a call from one of the girls in the Australian national women’s hockey team (not the Hockeyroos at the time, formalising that name is something I’m quite proud of) who also played for Westside Wolves, who had just come back from the Barcelona Olympics. 

She called me saying she was disappointed in their performance that Olympics and said, “why don’t you give coaching a crack?” 

It was honestly something I never intended to do, since I hadn’t necessarily enjoyed it while playing and had my full focus on practising medicine. 

I thought “why not?” and decided to give it a crack, which I had done many times before in my life – I'm not one to sit on the sidelines and not have a go at something new. 

I applied for the position and to my surprise was successful in my application, albeit controversially. 

The reception from many was that I hadn’t coached a women’s side before so how would I be successful in coaching this side? 

I was out to prove a point. 

I remember at the time I got appointed, which was around November that year, I couldn’t begin my coaching tenure until March the next year, as I had to wait for the election to pass. 

Although this was the case, my preparation had already begun - I was going to work in a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, rather than a suit and tie! 

The move to coaching itself was probably one of the best things I’ve ever done – I was able to help others and see them reach their full potential – it was such a rewarding feeling. 

The dynamic of the women’s national side was fantastic – I was surrounded by women who were ambitious, talented, hardworking, and had the common goal of becoming the best team the world has seen. 

Ric Charlesworth in his coaching days for the Kookaburras

It was also a fantastic environment to ply my trade as a beginner coach due to the sense of a new era. 

I tried to do many of the things that I’d want from the coach from my experiences as a player – with many of these tactics unseen by the squad. 

In some ways I was uniquely qualified to try these new tactics, as speaking in front of parliament for the 10 years previous allowed me to be extremely comfortable in front of varying groups – it felt like I was able to persuade people quite easily because of this, which allowed me to implement these new ideas a lot easier as a fresh face. 

On top of this, my study of medicine allowed me to understand the sports science and physiology aspect of playing and recovery – I knew what the players were going through. 

One of the key techniques that helped the team gain a competitive advantage during my tenure, albeit a simple one, was the proper utilisation of the interchange bench. No teams at the time properly utilised the interchange bench and constantly had their best 11 on the ground. We thought it’d give us a technical advantage and it improved the culture in the group because my mantra was if you’re selected, you’re going to play. So out of the 16 selected every match, 16 were given a chance, unlike the other teams who elected to play mainly the first 11. You fast forward two years and out of the squad of 25/26, the majority of them had at least 50 games under their belt because of this, which worked in our favour. Every player believed they belonged - and they did. 

The fact that every player had an opportunity resulted in such a healthy and competitive team environment, as everyone was fighting for a spot because they knew they had a chance. Training improved because of this, which resulted in players improving even further. 

The structure of our leadership was a key driver in our success – from my time as a player and studying different leadership styles, I put forward the idea of implementing a leadership style that was less hierarchal. 

Instead of a stand-alone captain, there were co-captains and vice-captains. 

This suited my thoughts on leadership to a 'T’– it’s not just one person, leadership is cultural, embracing diversity; it’s not following the one path. 

I was also very fortunate to have a great team around me, with roughly 16/17 coaches, doctors and physios at any given time, giving their all to the women’s national side, regardless of our budget. 

The Hockey Australia high-performance program, at the time, was years ahead of other sporting organisations', and I was lucky to have these tools to help drive our success. 

I remember being invited to the MCG to see Cricket Australia to discuss how our coaching system operates and what attributed to our success. 

I was sitting across the room from my former opening partner Geoff Marsh, who was coach of the Australian Cricket Team at the time. 

I remember him saying his coaching team consisted of himself, a physio and a team manager. 

Our budget at the time was only a fraction of what Cricket Australia’s was. 

I said “when are you going to get serious about getting good – when are you going to give the players the resources they need to improve?” 

We were way ahead at the time, many of the other national sides didn’t have such a focus being the best. 

I’m very proud of the fact that we were sustainably good for a long time when I coached, in the men’s and women’s. 

The legendary Hockeyroos team from the 90s that captured the hearts of Australians

Although a lot of the praise is put towards my tenure with the women’s team, in my stint coaching the men’s, 23 out of the 25 matches we won, we were just unfortunate to slip up in the 2012 London Olympics. 

Over my career, a lot of my success has been right place, right time, but when the opportunities came, I went for it and gave it my all. 

When I was a hockey player, I wouldn’t say I was the best at anything, but I was relatively good at most aspects of the game, which can be attributed to a lot of hard work. 

My father was also a great support to me – there were times where he could be harsh, but he was my biggest fan and made me put my foot towards the fire. 

As a professional athlete, one of the only ways to become the best was to be on the edge. You had to always be pushing yourself to the limits. You had to be comfortable being uncomfortable. 

I can thank hockey for having the life I had – to feel really satisfied with your life, finding one of the things you do best can really contribute to that. 

I can attribute a lot of this to being a coach which was probably one of the most satisfying periods of my professional life. 

It was a lot less selfish than being a player, you had to help others realise their potential, which was extremely rewarding. 

If you were to ask any of the players who played under me, they’d say my favourite saying was “the price of life is eternal vigilance”. 

And I hope that they’d say I made a difference to them and raised the bar. 

I loved the game and enjoyed playing it, the contests, the skill – the real beauty of the game was whatever else was happening in your life, hockey was an escape and freedom from all your troubles. 

You could hit the pitch, and nothing else mattered. 

The Ric Charlesworth Classic, run by Hockey WA, pits Western Australia’s best players against each other. The 2021 Ric Charlesworth Classic starts in March. Stay tuned for more information. 

Are you a hockey player (famous or not!) with a story to tell? Let us know! We want to be the platform for your voice to be heard – whether you’re playing at the grassroots or the elite level. Email us a brief overview of your story – media@hockeywa.org.au 

Last month we told the story of Krissy Bates - click here to read her story.