Redcliffe Hockey Club

Redcliffe Hockey Club

The Redcliffe Hockey Club has a long and proud history of families who have made lasting contributions to our hockey community. The Buchanan family is one of them. We are privileged to already count Hal Buchanan and Doss Buchanan as a Life Members, followed by Bruce Buchanan, inducted in 2020. It is now fitting that we acknowledge another pillar of this remarkable family.

I am honoured to nominate Tania (Tan) Buchanan for Life Membership of the Redcliffe Hockey Club.

Tan arrived at Redcliffe in the early 1990s, making her debut in our newly formed Division 6 Ladies grass team. That team went on to win the Premiership, and Tan proudly retired after one season—finishing her playing career on a Premiership high.

The 1990s also saw the arrival of three little Buchanan: Kate, Sarah and Daniel. All were destined to wear the red and green, with a Premiership-winning mum and a legendary dad in Bruce. Although I was not yet in Queensland during that time, many past and present club members have shared wonderful stories from the “old clubhouse era”—a time defined by volunteer spirit, community connection and unforgettable social events. In every one of these stories, Tan’s name was spoken with fondness and admiration. She was known for her willingness to help with any task, her reliability, and her natural ability to step in and take charge when needed. Just as often, her name appeared in stories of the many social events she helped organise and bring to life.

As her children progressed through the club, Tan became a team manager for many of their teams. During the majority of this period, these teams were coached by former President Cameron Howes. Tan’s ability to communicate calmly and work effectively with the Tech Bench meant she could often smooth over any “feathers” Cam may have ruffled—of which it’s rumoured there were a few. Her presence ensured teams remained organised and supported.

Tan also served as Junior Boys Chairperson for several seasons, and contributed to club fundraising by helping with the monthly Road Safety signage along the waterfront for multiple years. Bruce recalls she wasn’t always the one up the ladder, but she was absolutely there directing, organising and supporting the effort.

Major Milestones & Contributions

Turf Replacement Sinking Fund (2007)

One of Tan’s most significant achievements was her work with the Moreton Bay Regional Council to negotiate the establishment of the Turf Replacement Sinking Fund. This fund became a critical milestone in securing the long-term sustainability of our turf infrastructure and ensuring future access to government grants. Contributions began in July 2007 and remain in place today—a legacy of Tan’s diligence and advocacy.

 Clubhouse & Canteen Operations (2012)

When our new clubhouse and canteen were completed in 2012, Tan played a crucial role in establishing many of the operational processes we still rely on today. These included:

• Canteen staffing and rostering
• Stock purchasing and supplier management
• Correct payment processing—ending the era of “cash in hand”
• Banking and record-keeping systems
• Organising and managing cleaners

She also introduced the Volunteer Rewards Program, allowing players and members to reduce costs of fees by assisting in the canteen. This program remains highly successful and continues to support both the club and our families.

Treasurer (2013–2018)

Tan formally became Treasurer in 2013 and served until 2018. Her love of numbers, spreadsheets, and all things mathematical made her exceptionally well-suited to this role. Under her stewardship, the club’s finances became more structured, transparent and professionally managed. She served across three Presidents—Anthony Kenny, Trevor Barsby and Chris Hambling—highlighting her consistency, reliability and adaptability.

Transition to Majestri (2014–2015)

In 2015, Majestri was introduced as our club database. Before then, everything was paper-based. Tan spent at least a year researching options before the committee approved the transition at the end of 2014. She then took on the enormous task of setting up the system during the off-season.
This was a game-changing milestone for the club, dramatically improving:

• Accountability
• Record-keeping
• Communication
• Professionalism
• Convenience for members and committees

As someone who chaired the Junior Girls before Majestri, I can attest that its success was a relief and a credit to Tan’s initiative and perseverance.

Brett Forte Memorial Contributions (2017 onward)

Tan coordinated the first Brett Forte event at the Leagues Club in 2017, which included sourcing raffle and auction prizes. When the Brett Forte Memorial Games began, she again took on a leadership role—coordinating the day and then passing on the knowledge to future volunteers. Her organisation has been instrumental in the continued success of the event and its support of Police Legacy.

Conclusion

Across more than three decades, Tan has been a player, parent, manager, organiser, Treasurer, negotiator, volunteer coordinator and community leader. Her work has directly shaped the Redcliffe Hockey Club’s culture, systems, events, financial stability and future planning. Many of the processes we now consider standard practice exist because Tan created them, refined them or advocated for them.

She exemplifies the spirit of dedication, community and service that Life Membership honours.

On a personal note, when Tan approached me to take over as Treasurer during the 2018 season, during a “social session”, my initial thoughts were one of pure horror!  I don’t have her love of mathematics for starters, how was I even going to fill her shoes.  Looking back now, I didn’t have to be filled with horror, because Tan had already put all the systems in place.  I just had to learn them plus Tan was, and still is, available to mentor me through all areas.  She isn’t just a former Committee Member to me, she has become a personal friend.

The Redcliffe Hockey Club has been blessed over its history to have many families that have become a fabric of the Redcliffe Hockey Club community. The Lancaster’s are one of those families.

It is with immense pride that I nominate Steven Lancaster as a Life Member of the Redcliffe Hockey Club.

Steven, like many other club stalwarts started playing junior hockey at a very young age with brothers Jeffrey and Rodney at Redcliffe. The three brothers played in the junior ranks in their respective age groups over the years, playing representative hockey along the way. All three went onto playing senior grade hockey at Redcliffe sharing the playing field at different stages through their playing careers.

Steven’s brother Jeffrey has kindly provided the following contribution to this life member nomination with information of Steven’s history with the Redcliffe Hockey, including the early years.

“Steven “Minky” Lancaster — A Redcliffe Life in Hockey

The Lancaster family arrived at the Redcliffe fields in 1973 with three boys and a borrowed stick between them. Jeff was eight, Rodney was six and Steven - smallest, stubbornest - was four. That gap in years would become the shaping force of Steve’s hockey life. He learned to run a step faster, to think a touch quicker, to tuck in behind bigger bodies and still find the goal. From the beginning, he played up - against age, against size, sometimes against common sense - and he never stopped.

The hockey club was the family’s second home. John and Gloria, Steve’s parents, were the sort of club people who make seasons possible and culture durable. They coached junior teams through the 1970’s and 80’s and served on committees. Early Saturday mornings they were down at the fields with other volunteers, mowing and lining the pitches for the weekend. Steve grew up inside that rhythm. While Mum and Dad worked with the line-markers and mowers, he’d be the little kid climbing the trees by the middle (main) grass field, soaking in the place that would quietly become his life’s place.

Those early Redcliffe years set a pattern - family first, club always. Even off the field, the Lancaster boys were pitching in. Alongside mates from their generation, they mowed Mary Nairn’s yard across from the fields. It was never a chore; it was what you did. It said something about belonging - about being part of Redcliffe, not just playing for it.

Steve spent five years in the Under 8s, a run that foreshadowed the player he’d become. He represented Brisbane and Queensland throughout his junior years, the kind of consistent selection that tells you talent is real and work ethic is relentless. In one remarkable season he scored more than 100 goals, earning a full-page feature in the Sunday Telegraph. That was the year a nickname was born. Today, “Minky” is a label for small-sided junior hockey; in the 1970s it wasn’t. Steve was christened “Minky” after the minke whale - small only by comparison, swift and hard to pin down. The name stuck because it fit. Over the years he gathered others - “SOL” (a teammate’s affectionate shorthand for his combustible competitive streak) and “Finger” (a nod to the tally of fractures collected in pursuit of the ball) - but Minky, or just Mink, was the constant. It became less a nickname rather a signature.

There were two brief wanderings from Redcliffe. Once, as a junior, he followed the family to Easts for a season; later, as a senior, he joined his older brothers at City United to play Division One. Both times, he came home. Redcliffe wasn’t an address in a fixture list; it was identity. Over more than forty years he played and coached here, winning a  BHA Division One premiership as a player and a BWHA Division One premiership as a coach. He became, by any measure that matters, a Redcliffe man.

The numbers are generous and telling. Steve is among the most capped Division One players in both BHA and Redcliffe history, with more than 300 top-grade appearances and more than 200 goals. Count the goals if you like - it’s fun - but see what they represent: a standard maintained over decades; the knack for being in the right place at the right time; the instinct to lead a press, to time a lead, to square a pass when the shot isn’t on. They also tell you he showed up. Year after year, season after season, through changes in coaching styles, surfaces, sticks and systems, he was there in Redcliffe colours, setting the temperature for teammates and the tone for juniors watching from the fence.

If you ask around the club, you’ll hear the same themes in a dozen different voices: fierce competitor, fierce loyalist; high standards; relentless on the ball, supportive of athletes; a natural finisher who coached as if the best goal you’ll ever score is the one a 14-year-old learns to create for themself. Premierships as a player and as a coach are rare enough; rarer still is the person who treats both as collective achievements and measures his legacy in the confidence of the young and the pride of the club.

The nicknames map the man. “Minky” captures the speed, the slipperiness, the way he made space where none seemed to exist. “SOL” hints at the edge - an honesty about emotion that high-performance sport demands and teammates respect. “Finger” is the ledger of breakages that come from refusing to play half-committed. They’re a shared vocabulary of affection, respect, and stories told after training, long after the floodlights dim. They say: he mattered to us.

What endures even more than the numbers is the consistency of his presence. Steve is one of those people who become part of a club’s furniture in the best sense - ever present, ever contributing. He is the senior player who still has time for the athlete who missed selection, the coach who remembers the name of the those who came before him and those who are coming behind, the bloke who will finish a drill cone-perfect because standards are a gift you give to the next generation. He’s old enough to remember wooden sticks and muddy grass, and modern enough to have lifted trophies on water-based turf. Through all of it, he’s been the same thing: Redcliffe.

There’s a certain poetry in tracing his hockey life as a circle that keeps widening back to its centre. It starts with a four-year-old climbing trees while his parents mark the lines. It widens to Brisbane and Queensland colours, to newspaper pages and goal tallies, to Division One and Premierships. It widens again to the dugout, to the whiteboard, to the BHA and BWHA and the joy of building championship teams from the other side of the line. And every time it widens, it arcs back to Redcliffe - the familiar walk from the car park through the Mary Nairn gates, the feel of a Redcliffe shirt, the quiet pride of belonging to a place that made you and that you, in turn, help make.

Life Membership should mean more than longevity. It should recognise the people who embody a club’s best instincts - who make the place larger by the way they play, coach, serve and carry themselves. Steven “Minky” Lancaster has given Redcliffe more than seasons and goals and trophies. He has given it a model: show up, play hard, keep coming back and leave the club stronger than you found it. In every way that counts, he hasn’t just been part of Redcliffe history. He is Redcliffe history.”

Thank you Jeffrey.

Through the years Steven has become a rusted on Redcliffe Hockey Club legend, one of the rare players in our club that has played 306 Division 1 games over many years scoring in excess of 200 goals, that included two Division 1 Premiership successes in 1988 and 1989 as a talented and precocious 19 year old, and 3 successive Division 1 Grand Final appearances in 1998, 1999, and 2000. Steven also went onto Captain his club later in his playing career, mentoring younger players and displaying the passion, skill, and desire required to be a Redcliffe Hockey Club player.

Minkey, a nickname that he was tagged with many decades ago due to his diminutive stature has stood the test of time, however, don’t let the nickname fool you. Although slight in build, this player was a no-nonsense striker that took no prisoners. To say that Steve was a pest to his defender counterparts is to make a massive understatement, I’ve personally seen evidence of this doggedness myself. The term, 10 foot tall and bullet proof leaps to mind. What a torment he must’ve been to play against, with no shortage of ‘advice’ provided by Steve to exasperated opposition players.

His skill of being a pest has never left him. And he has even passed on this skill to others.

Over his latter playing years Steven was to learn, like many others, that competing at the highest level in their chosen sport, that winning premierships is not an easy pursuit, despite playing again in a grand final, further premiership success was not achieved. I make this point for a reason, because the burning desire for premiership success for the Redcliffe Hockey Club has never him at any stage in his life.

Arguably, Steven warrants Life Membership on his playing deeds alone, but as we all now know, the story does not end there.

As time rolled on, Steven, his wife Marina, and their then young children, Bailey and Reese moved away from the Peninsula region, up to the Sunshine Coast where his playing days continued, but this is where his coaching career really kicked in. And success followed, coaching junior and senior teams to premierships over several years. During this time Steve moved into representative coaching for Queensland junior teams and again success followed, often coaching teams to finals appearances in National Championships. It was during these years that Steve developed relationships with many players and their families that, as we now know, would lead to bigger things.

As the song goes, ‘from little things big things grow’. And how poignant that little phrase is.

At the end of the 2015 season Trevor Barsby and Kelli Robinson had discussions about the future of the senior women’s division and discussed plans on returning the then division 2 team back into the Brisbane Women’s Hockey Association Division 1 competition. As a result of their discussions Kelli contacted Steve to see if this was a challenge that he would consider taking on. And history shows that he did.

Steve took on the role of Division 2 coach and set into motion his ‘three-year plan’ to return the team to Division 1. He was eager, excited, and all in! He set about gathering a group of players to play Division 2 into 2016 using current Redcliffe players, along with players and families he had built relationships with over the years on the Sunshine Coast and representative teams he had coached.

Steve made a conscious decision to not make raids on other Brisbane clubs to steal players as he did not want to build up Redcliffe team numbers by diluting Brisbane clubs of their own players. 

Two years into the ‘three year plan’ Steve decided the leap into the Division 1 competition had to be taken ‘now’ to ensure the future development of the players and the team. A gutsy call, but one that needed to be made.

Over the years Steve’s relationships with regional players and families led them to join the Redcliffe Hockey Club to be their Brisbane ‘home’, and as time has passed, all of our players have, under the guidance of Steve, learned what it means to be a member of the Redcliffe Hockey Club family, along with the necessary qualities of desire, culture, effort, and the disciplines required to succeed. In turn, this guidance has led to many players making various representative teams over the journey, including two of our players achieving the ultimate goal as a player, representing the Australian national team, the Hockeyroos.

As a coach Steven is meticulous in preparation and execution and has an understanding and feel for the game that would be the envy of any coach. Hockey being a team sport of course means that team play and team dynamics are critical. But Steve also has a focus on individuals to hone their own development as a player, and as a person. Many many hours have been spent at the fields to work with individuals to focus on their game and skills as it is not always possible to provide this one-on-one coaching in a team training environment.  

Of course, we are all aware that in 2024, after years of hard work, dedication, and focus on the end game, the ultimate goal was achieved. Not only making the Brisbane Women’s Hockey Association Premier League 1 Grand Final for the first time in the club’s 92 year history, but to go on and win the Premiership. Steven and this group of players have etched themselves in our club’s proud history forever!

What a delight it was to see many past players that have forged the path for our club, along with current and junior players, witness and be a part of this historic milestone event for the Redcliffe Hockey Club.

This will certainly be Steve’s enduring legacy to our club and would definitely not have happened without his desire to see our proud club at the top.

Life Membership for Steven is a deserving recognition for a life-long dedication to the Redcliffe Hockey Club, but also a fitting acknowledgement of the contributions of the Lancaster family.