Born Midland W.A.
15 April 1946
Gaye Teede rates captaining the triumphant Australian team in the 1971 World Netball Championships in Jamaica as the finest hour of her long and distinguishing career.
The agile centre/ wing attack played a dominant role in helping Australia to regain the world crown from New Zealand and as a result was named Western Australia’s Sportsman on the Year by the WA Sports Federation.
She also derived great satisfaction from returning to the Australian team in 1978 after taking a seven- year’s break from netball to raise a pair of twins and discovering that her ball-handling skills and court-craft were still as good as ever.
Her comeback was so convincing that she was named vice captain of the Australian team which contested the 1979 World Championship in Trinidad and finished in a three-way tie for first place.
As Gaye Switch, she first represented WA at under-16 level in 1961 and was picked in the state senior team in 1963, the first of many occasions where she earned All-Australian selection.
As a teenager she combined netball with track athletics, showing talent as a sprinter. Her natural speed and finely-tuned reflexes made her difficult to counter on a netball court. She was driving force in the state team when WA won the Australian Championships outright for the first time in Adelaide in 1969.
A serious knee injury in 1979 World Tournament ended Gate Teede’s playing career. Since then she has continued to serve netball at state and national level as a coach and selector. She won Sports Australia awards as coach and national titles with under-21 teams in 1986 and1988. In 1999 she returned to WA to coach the Perth Orioles in the National Netball League.