BALLARAT has walked away with two gold medals from the State Country Hockey Championships which wrapped up on Monday in Melbourne.
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Both the masters women and the masters red men walked away with the top prize from the three-day carnival which was played at the Hawthorn Malvern Hockey Centre.
All four teams Ballarat sent to the titles played for medals with the open men winning its third placed play-off over Goulburn Valley, while Ballarat White finished fourth, when it lost the third-place play-off game, also against Goulburn Valley.
In the women's masters, Ballarat was a dominant team across the three days, defeating Hockey Central Vic. 5-2 in the gold medal match.
Ballarat was led by two goals each from both Alicia Concannon and Mary Buchanan while Jordana Shields also got on the scoreboard in the grand final.
in the men's masters, the red team won 4-0 with Liam Turnbull starring with a hat-trick in the final, while Nathan Hargreaves was best on ground and topped up his game with a goal of his own to finish the competition in style.
Men's white coach Jeff Sly, said was a great weekend for the entire program at Hockey Ballarat, saying he was thrilled with how well his team competed as well as the performances of all the medal winners
"The girls are just a really good, solid team and they have worked in well together for a number of years," he said. "They won it last year as well and they showed just how good a team they are.
"We sent the two men's teams, but really, there was one that was designed around winning the title, they had a few more players who were closer to the 35 age range and they showed their class throughout."
It was also an impressive showing from the men's open team which was predominantly a team of youngsters from the Westvic program.
While they went down in the semi-final, they rebounded strongly to take the third placing with a 4-2 win over Goulburn Valley to win the bronze.
Goals in that game came from Simon Churcher, Ben Huf, Cooper Pinson and Daniel Walsh.
Hockey Victoria also conducted a survey about the future of country week with Sly confirming a lot of the talk around the competition was that it should be based in country centres in future.
He said regions such as Geelong, which is getting a new hockey centre in time for the Commonwealth Games, Bendigo and Shepparton would be ideal venues for the competition going into the future.
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