Hi I’m Brent Livermore, co owner and founder of Croc Hockey.

I have been involved in hockey for over 30 years, from grassroots through international all the way to Olympic gold.

Originally from Northern New South Wales, I was first selected to play for Australia in 1997 and was lucky enough to pull on the Kookaburras jersey 317 times for Australia, accumulating 3 Commonwealth Games Gold Medals, 2 Champions trophy Gold medals, 1 Olympic bronze and an Olympic Gold medal and was awarded the Kookaburras player of the year award in 2001. I have also been nominated twice (2002, 2005) in the FIH Player of the Year awards.

My proudest sporting achievement was when I was honored to be captain of the Australian Olympic team in Athens which finally secured Australia its first Olympic gold medal in Men’s Hockey after 48 years of trying.

Currently, I am the NSW Institute of Sport Head Coach as well as a National Training Coach and coach of the NSW Pride Hockey 1 team which allows me to work closely with our top players at an elite level.

My passion for the sport over many years has allowed me to gain a vast knowledge of what is required when it comes to hockey equipment. During my time I have seen many developments in hockey gear and have also been involved in developing equipment with many hockey brands. Back in 2010? I worked with Mazon to develop what became and still is to this day their best-selling stick, the Mason 360.

I have also been working with Asics developing their top-selling Ultimate Field Hockey shoe. I have over the years been keen to assist companies in their equipment development but more recently I have turned my attention to combining all my years of experience and knowledge to developing my own brand of world class hockey equipment.

Sprouting from initial thoughts and discussions around how modern day sticks have gradually evolved from timber to composite materials in their construction but asking why the same generic shape has been maintained despite players evolving their skills to include 3D skills, tommas, and overheads. Sticks have simply not kept pace with the evolution of players demands. So I teamed up with some like minded business and design partners and set ourselves a task to evaluate the traditional stick design and rebuild it for the modern player. After two years of designing, prototyping and testing we have achieved what we have no doubt is the finest hockey stick ever produced. The result was the Croc XLB14.

We saw deficiencies in modern stick design in areas as simple as stick width. We could not believe how most manufacturers were making sticks up to 8mm narrower than allowable under the rules. Obviously the wider your stick the easier it is to trap and hit. It’s not rocket science but obviously the majority of manufacturers don’t take notice.

We also increased head area at the toe, we have increased the head area buy doing away with the traditional rounded end, and extending it. This makes a noticeable difference for players accepting backhand receives. We then flattened it off and angled it back towards the shaft to create a hook to catch the ball when doing spins and penalty corner injections. These innovations make an amazing difference to player performance.

That wasn’t enough though, as the modern game is rapidly moving towards increased use of attacking overheads we looked at how to improve the ability for everyday players to acquire these skills, we saw obvious restrictions in the traditional bulbous head so we shaved it back and adjusted our carbon construction to allow the stick to slide further under the ball allowing more of the head to be in contact with the ball at the point of lifting making it effortless to lift the ball.

Additionally, we have dramatically increased the width of the tomma edge drastically increasing the players chances of making a clean strike on the ball when tommaring.

Along with the obvious physical attributes of the stick we have changed the composition and manufacturing process to accommodate some of these changes. All this combines to bring to the market what we know is the best stick ever produced.

These features will be standard in all Croc pro level sticks and you can be assured that the same level to detail and quality is being applied to every Croc Product we bring to you.

Brent Livermore (OAM)