The Burnside Ice Hockey team had a successful season in 2023, playing in the High School League on Saturdays at the Alpine Ice Arena.

After losing almost half the players from our gold medal winning team from 2022, we started the season on the back foot learning how to play with each other. However our veteran plays did extremely well in showing our rookies the ropes and fostering a positive team environment. We are incredibly proud of our rookies who improved leaps and bounds since the beginning of the season and ended up being real assets to the team.

We ended up placing 2nd in our regulation season. Unfortunately we were beaten in the gold medal game, in an incredibly close semi-final game against a combined St Andrew's/Christchurch Boys High team. We ended up placing 3rd in the bronze medal game against Shirley Boys High School.

This season we also sent a Combined team to the South Island Secondary Schools' Ice Hockey tournament in Dunedin during Winter Tournament Week. This team was made up with mostly Burnside High players but had additions from several other schools to make up the numbers. We played in the B grade and proved to be a force to be reckoned with, winning 5 out of 6 round-robin games. Unfortunately we lost to the combined St Andrew's/Christchurch Boys High team in an another extremely close gold medal game. 

We are grateful to our Teacher Manager, Ms Burgess, who travelled to Dunedin with us, and Mrs Knights, who managed us in our Christchurch season, coming to almost every game and supporting us. We are also extremely thankful to our coach, Alyssa Murphy, who is an ex-Burnside student and has coached us for the past two seasons. We owe a great deal of our success and improvement to Alyssa.

Indie Lewis