There were many outstanding athletes throughout the world that excelled and ultimately became the greatest players in their respective sports. They are highly revered and formally recognized for their skills and career accomplishments.

They are the standard by whom all others are measured. They have earned their place in time as the best of the best that will eventually be enshrined in a place reserved for those who have achieved the pinnacle in their sport, the Hall of Fame. They are the legends of the game.

Ball hockey, a fun and relatively unstructured activity played by children with little or no equipment on neighborhood streets, began to establish itself as a viable sport organization in the middle 1970’s and in 1974 the Ontario Ball hockey Association was born.  There were thousands of players, who all graduated from the rough asphalt surfaces to smooth concrete arena floors, that helped to foster the growth and development of the game into a formal association with a governing body and championship competition at all levels of participation. There were some among those pioneers of the pavement whose skill, achievements and longevity in the game placed them in a class all by themselves….

On the street, ball hockey’s most ostensible offenders were indeed as unique, skilled and accomplished as the aforementioned heroes who played on frozen pads, only they wore sneakers and had to earn every inch of paved real estate on foot throughout their life span in the O.B.H.A.

Without further ado, the top fifteen players of all time:

The Goaltenders
The O.B.H.A. goaltenders are represented by the finest ball stoppers that the game has ever seen in Kathryn Padmore (Crush) and Carol Zaborski (Red Wings).  They were the foundation and played an integral part in the success and achievements of their teams throughout the years.

The Defence
These defenders stood tall on the floating blue line in the Ontario Ball Hockey Association over the past thirty years. Beth Brotherstone (Roadrunners/Predators), Diana Brown (Dragons), Michelle Rosenberg (Red Wings/Roadrunners), Vicki Ruth (Dragons/Predators) and Britni Smith (Stampede).

The Fabulous Forwards
When one considers the foray of fabulous forwards that ‘skiddadled’ into the neutral zone and ‘knifed their way over the blue line’ before letting go of a ‘cannonating drive’ on net, there was a special group of players that comes to mind.
The most outstanding forwards in the game of ball hockey over the past 30 years are:

Isabelle Aube (Rebels), Angela James (Dragons), Oonagh Hastie (Dragons), Geraldine Heaney (Dragons/Red Wings), Cindy Horton (Dragons), Michelle Long (Dragons) Irene Kiratzis (Red Wings/Extreme) and Sharon O’Doherty (Red Wings/Extreme)

Congratulations to the Top 15 Players of the Past thirty years in the Ontario Ball Hockey Association.