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August 25, 2016
Inline hockey and design: a winning combo
Continuing our series of Theta staffers doing interesting things outside of work, this month we meet Joe Dowman, Theta’s Wellington-based graphic designer. When not working his design magic, Joe plays and coaches inline hockey, which last month took him to Hawaii as a NZ coach at the AAU Inline Hockey Junior Olympics.
Joe was appointed NZ Coaching Apprentice this year. As well as coaching the NZ U14 Girls team (pictured below) to gold medal success in both club and international competitions, he was part of the coaching team for the NZ Masters team, which also won two gold medals, and the U18 girls team, which won the club competition and came second to Canada in the international round. That’s a total of five golds and a silver, not a bad haul!
Joe began his career as a coach with his 7-year-old brother’s team, twelve years ago. One of his AAU Junior Olympic highlights was seeing a player he had been coaching since she was twelve beat the US and win a medal – “it was fantastic to see how far she had come, and to have been part of the journey.”
Joe says he picked up some new ways of approaching problems, and interacting with players and their parents, at the Junior Olympics. When asked if there were any parallels between coaching and working as a designer, Joe said: “the ability to be analytical, to take a step back and look at things from a different angle is a skill that I use in both contexts.”
He aspires to a lead coach role, and to continue to develop and travel with the sport he loves.
