Alyson Annan OAM was born in Wentworthville NSW in 1973 and is widely recognised as Australia’s greatest female hockey player.

Across the hockey world the debate rages as to whether Alyson or the Argentinian legend Luciana Aymar is the greatest of all time. For many Alyson would be first selected because of her prodigious goal scoring talent (and goals win matches), whereas Aymar was a playmaker extraordinaire.

When a player scores 166 goals in 228 international matches against the best defenders in the world one can only marvel at her achievement.

Alyson came from the NSW hockey program under the guidance of coach Judy Laing before heading to the Australian Institute Sport hockey program in Perth aged 19. Immediately the coaches of both the men’s and the women’s programs thought, ‘here is a player with that X factor’.

Former National Coach and AIS Head Coach Richard Aggiss recalls watching Alyson from his office window, flicking the ball from the top of the circle (16 yards) into the goal and under the cross bar.

Very few female players worldwide could perform that skill in the early 1990’s but a young Alyson Annan made it look easy. It wasn’t long before she was selected in the Australian team under the professional guidance of legendary Australian coach Brian Glencross.

Alyson was selected for her first international match for Australia in June 1991 against Korea in a star-studded forward line that included Rechelle Hawkes, Sharon Buchanan and Jackie Pereira.

Alyson scored her first international goal against Great Britain in the same year, and although her international career was not as long as many others, she played in 228 internationals and scored 166 goals – a remarkable conversion rate of over 72% in a career that spanned 11 years until her premature retirement in 2001.

Another highlight of Alyson’s career was scoring eight goals throughout the tournament in the Hockeyroos’ Gold Medal winning performance at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Alyson was a scoring machine in a golden generation of Hockeyroos teams that won two Olympic Gold Medals (1996, 2000), two World Cups (1994, 1998), four Champions Trophies and a Commonwealth Gold Medal in Kuala Lumpur in 1998.

Alyson was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 2013 and into the Hockey Australia Hall of Fame in 2010. She became a Hockey Legend in the Hockey Australia Hall of Fame in 2018. In 1998 and 2000 she was voted the FIH Player of the Year by her hockey peers in a world-wide poll, and in 1999 she was voted by an independent panel as the best female player in the world.

After retiring as a player, Alyson moved to Holland with her partner and over time established herself as a quality coach. In 2015 she was appointed national coach of the Netherlands Women’s Team, coaching them to the 2016 Olympic Final in Rio de Janeiro, only to be surprisingly defeated by Great Britain.

Two years later at the World Cup, the Netherlands scored an emphatic victory to win the Gold Medal match 6-0 and Alyson was reappointed to take the team to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which would be postponed by 12 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2021 she cemented her status as one of the world’s best hockey coaches as she guided the Netherlands to victory for the 100th time in just 120 international matches. This status was further enhanced as the Netherlands won Olympic gold in Tokyo, Alyson becoming the first woman to win hockey gold medals as a player and a coach at separate Olympics.

By any definition Alyson is a Legend of the sport.