FIH President’s Award presented to Larry Cornofsky

Larry Cornofsky, a judge at the current women’s BDO Hockey Junior World Cup, was awarded the FIH President’s Award at a lunch in Santiago today.

Cornofsky was afforded the honour in recognition of his outstanding contribution and expertise in tournament administration over many years.

Involved in hockey as a player, a coach and volunteer administrator, his aim has been to automate the administration of hockey tournaments to achieve professional looking outcomes and create a database of hockey results and information which will provide as complete as possible a record of major hockey events.

In 1995, Cornofsky was Assistant Competition Manager – Results (Hockey) at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Test Event. After seeing the difficulties in producing match reports and appointment sheets by way of typewriter, he created a software package to automate this process.

This system was implemented at the Atlanta pre-Olympic four-nation event, including a program to simplify the process of updating pool tables.

In 1996 his system was used by IBM as the basis for developing the results systems for the Olympic Games – which is now an integral part of ORIS and has been used in Sydney and Athens.

He was also Sports Services Supervisor (Hockey) at the 2000 Olympic Games.

The first time the software was used by the FIH at a major world level event was in 1997 at the men’s Champions Trophy in Adelaide. 

The software has been used by FIH since 2001 at all world level events. In addition, it is also being used by CF’s at their major events. In addition, the system is currently being used in Australia, South Africa, Canada, USA, China, Netherlands, Germany and Ireland.

Visitors to the FIH website during any major tournament can view a copy of the official match report sheet soon after the completion of a match.

Larry was involved with the testing of ORIS (Olympic Results Information System) on behalf of the FIH for Athens 2004 and will also be involved on behalf of FIH with ORIS for Beijing 2008.

Cornofsky has been a tremendous contributor to hockey administration at all levels and has been responsible for bringing tournament administration/documentation into the 21^st century.

He is always willing to assist and advise clubs, national associations, continental federations and FIH.