If you've met Ollie, there's a pretty good chance you've heard about hockey.

At 10 years old, hockey has become a huge part of his world — both ice and inline. What started as something he loved doing has grown into training several times a week, representative competition, development camps, interstate travel and an increasingly ambitious list of places he'd like the sport to take him.

And if you ask him where that ends? The NHL. Obviously. We know that's an enormous dream for a kid growing up in Queensland. But we're also not particularly interested in teaching him to make his dreams smaller simply because they're difficult.

Instead, we're trying to teach him something much simpler: You show up. You do the work. You take the opportunities in front of you. And then you see how far you can go.

Ollie represented Queensland at the 2025 Australian Inline Hockey National Championships held in Tasmania, where the Queensland Under 9 team finished as national runners-up. In 2026, he was selected to represent Queensland again, this time in his hometown and home rink!

He now plays and develops across both ice and inline hockey. His strengths are his puck handling, shooting, hockey IQ and sheer tenacity. He's also learning that becoming a better athlete means spending a lot of time working on the things that aren't already your strengths.

For Ollie, one of those things is skating. So he works on it. There are extra sessions, development camps, early mornings, late nights and a truly unreasonable number of kilometres driven by Mum and Dad. And this is where this fundraiser comes in.

We're not fundraising for a destination. We're backing the journey.

As Ollie develops, opportunities are beginning to appear beyond his regular club hockey — representative competition, interstate tournaments, specialist coaching, camps and other development experiences. Those opportunities also come with significant costs. Funds raised here will help us say yes to more of them, contributing towards things like development and specialist coaching, representative and competition costs, interstate travel and accommodation, training opportunities and hockey equipment.

Our goal is $10,000, but this isn't about reaching one magic number or funding one particular tournament. It's about building a little runway beneath a kid who is already willing to run.

So, will he make the NHL?

We have absolutely no idea. And that's kind of the point. He's ten. There are years of hockey, growing, learning, winning, losing, falling over, getting back up and figuring out who he is between here and whatever comes next. His job isn't to know how the story ends. His job is to keep showing up. Our job is to give him every reasonable opportunity we can to find out. And if you choose to donate, share his fundraiser, follow his progress or simply yell a little louder when #34 gets the puck, you're helping us do exactly that.

Thank you for backing Ollie. Let's see how far he can go. #34!