Gemming calls time on an incredible career in Hockey

You'll struggle to find anyone in the world more passionate about hockey than Gill Gemming. The Tauranga local is a living legend within our game and her impact will have touched every hockey player in the country, and many abroad.

Although she was due to retire from her role as Continental Development Officer at Oceania Hockey on the 1st of July, she says she's "just finishing up a few reports" before she goes … a fitting final act for a career defined by quietly getting things done.

Gemming is a world-class tournament administrator who has overseen international tournaments for more than 15 years. She has coached future Black Sticks and received numerous awards, including the FIH President's Award, the Oceania Olympic Merit Award and the Hockey New Zealand Gold Service Award. She holds a Life Membership with Oceania Hockey and in 2018 was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for services to hockey.

Despite all of this, when we spoke with her recently she was far more interested in reflecting on what the game has taught her and how determined she remains to see it keep growing.

Gemming first picked up a stick in year seven or eight. After later going on to qualify as a teacher she then began coaching age-group boys' teams. "I coached at Hatch Cup for six years... I was the only female coach at Hatch Cup for a long time." That experience shaped the rest of her career and she recalls that this was where the passion came from to try and encourage more women to be involved, and to provide opportunities and pathways for them.  

An international thread appeared early, too. She and her husband spent four years in Australia during his medical training, where her club coach happened to be a national Australian women's coach who brought her in to help with the state under-16 girls. That connection paid off years later, giving her an inside line into Hockey Australia once she took on the Oceania role.

Little did she know, that role would became a full-time career in 1995, when she joined Hockey New Zealand as one of just six Development Officers nationwide, helping build the coaching and pathway frameworks that still underpin the sport today. In 2002, Ramesh Patel offered her the National Coaching and Development Manager's role, with an easily-missed addition at the bottom of the job description: a small responsibility for Oceania. "I said to Ram, 'What does this mean?'" she laughs. "He said, 'Oh well, look, it's just we provide the person, Hockey Australia does the finance.'" That afterthought would define the next two decades of her working life. By 2005 FIH had formalised the role continentally, and from 2009 she worked across the Pacific full-time.

Ask Gemming for highlights and she talks about people, not titles.

One clear example is the Pacific Islands girls' and women's hockey camp, reinstated by FIH after a long hiatus. "We ended up with 54 participants. It was just an awesome experience," she says. Thirty-four athletes aged 13 to 18 attended, alongside seven youth leaders tasked with planning and running a two-day event themselves, umpiring included, despite many never having umpired before. The impact outlasted the week itself: "All of those youth leaders are now giving back in their national federation, whether it's running competitions or umpiring."

Then there's ‘Champions Give Back’, born from a visit to Samoa where she watched players standing on the sideline "waiting for the sticks to come off the field for the next group to go on." The programme still channels donated gear from New Zealand associations into the islands today.

More recently, Hockey for Health, funded by the Australian government, has employed 15 development officers across Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, none of whom had held a paid job before. "Being able to be employed and gain capabilities has led to a few of them now working in government sports roles," she says, though losing good people to bigger opportunities is always bittersweet: "We're always sad to lose them."

Gemming's guiding philosophy is simple: hockey in the Pacific has to be built by Pacific people, not delivered to them.

Hockey Fives has proven the point. It requires no turf and barely any infrastructure, "it can be played on the sand, on concrete, on the supermarket car park, anywhere you want to play," and its simple rules have made it far easier to train and recruit local umpires. It now runs alongside full Oceania Cup competitions, letting Pacific Island athletes compete alongside Australia and New Zealand.

The FIH Academy has had a similar effect, creating one global accreditation standard so a qualification earned in one country means the same everywhere. New Zealand was first in Oceania to adopt it, and last year Gemming and Kirsten Stuckey ran a coach developers course in Fiji with eight successful candidates. "Now they can run their own level ones and twos, and it doesn't require someone to come from somewhere else," she says. "That makes it a lot more sustainable."

She's also proud that Oceania has served as a springboard for New Zealand officials and umpires stepping into international careers, and of helping establish Oceania Sports Federations at a time when island sports had little structure to lean on. Smaller sports have benefited most from that shift, she notes, thanks to a spirit of cooperation that's grown across the region. Her work with the Oceania Olympic Committee's Education Commission, developing new frameworks for island nations, is one she calls "a real highlight."

Gemming is candid about an early misstep: flying people in from New Zealand and Australia to run clinics directly. "The enthusiasm would only last while they were there," she says. "You actually have to grow the game through locals and give them an opportunity… that's the change that's really worked for us."

Governance, she says, is the unglamorous foundation everything else depends on. Without it, programmes are not sustainable. And her broader advice after decades in the game is simple: "It's about being patient. Development takes quite a long time, and you can't rush it."

Gemming wants Pacific nations to keep running their own accreditation pathways so they can put their own spin on delivery, while standards stay consistent. She wants accessible formats like Hockey Fives to keep opening doors, and she wants the game to keep reaching further than the pitch.

She's also enjoyed seeing the way hockey has begun to embrace new platforms and ways of engaging audiences, pointing to the recent National U18 Tournaments as a great example of how modern streaming can expose hockey to a wider audience. She’s also looking forward to seeing  more of the game’s human stories told, the generational players and quiet volunteers whose contributions often go unshared,

It's a fitting note from someone whose career was never really about hockey in isolation. It was about what hockey could do for people. Even in her final weeks before retirement, Gill Gemming is still finishing the reports, still closing the loop, still making sure the game she's spent her life aiding is left stronger than she found it, and it found her.

On behalf of Hockey New Zealand, we would like to thank Gill for her extraordinary contribution to our sport. Her dedication, leadership and tireless advocacy have left a lasting mark on hockey in New Zealand, throughout Oceania and across the wider hockey community. We wish her all the very best for her well-deserved retirement and know her legacy will continue to shape the game for generations to come.