{xtypo_dropcap}A{/xtypo_dropcap}fter his first season with Subiaco colts, seventeen year old Ken Screech would have been looking forward to a successful career in league football.

He had played at centre half forward in the colts side that made the finals, and was also caught up in the excitement and jubilation of the club's first league premiership in forty nine years.

Football is a funny game, and the club was to plummet to it's lowest depths during the following decade.

Never again was Ken Screech to taste finals football, let alone a premiership.

A prodigious kick, Screech, at six foot three and eighty eight kg's, was a highly mobile player, with a reliable pair of hands. Making the league side in 1975, as a nineteen year old, with his first game on a half back flank on Perth's David Pretty, he had only played two games before a back injury sustained at work threatened to bring an end to his career.

Told he would never play again, Screech refused to accept the verdict that his fledgling career was over, and it was Orthopaedic Surgeon, Dr Webb, who performed a laminectory on the young footballer, and, after a three month stay in hospital, he was back in the Maroon guernsey in 1976.

After fluctuating between league and reserves, Ken was moved to full back, where he was to play the bulk of his career. Despite two dislocated shoulders, a broken wrist, and hamstring injuries, Screech became the regular custodian for Subiaco.

The advent of the Eighties brought a rocky road for Ken Screech.

In 1980, his manager, Brian Featherby, was fielding offers on two fronts.

East Perth and West Perth were looking for a defender, and both made offers. After some to-ing and fro-ing from the three clubs, Ken chose East Perth, and became part of a swap with East Perth rover, Alex Hamilton.

“I went the wrong way,” said Ken.

After playing the first four games of the 1981 season with the league side, a finger injury caused Screech to have surgery during the following week. Coach Barry Cable told him he'd have a few runs in the reserves while the injury healed, but reserves mentor, Grant Dorrington had another agenda, in direct contrast to Cable, which led to Ken walking out on the Royals.

“It was a bitter experience,” recalled Screech. “I went back to Suby and gave Peter Burton a hand, and didn't play again that year.”

Cleared back to Subiaco in 1981, Screech returned to the league side, but a disagreement with new coach, Ken Armstrong, led eventually to his retirement. “We just didn't get on,” Ken said. As an illustration of his frustration with the new man at the helm, he told us of one of the run ins they had.

“I had just walked into the rooms after playing with the ressies, after a close game, which we lost. I threw my jumper down, missed the bench, and it landed in the bin. Ken stopped his pre game address in mid speech and ordered me to write an apology to my jumper.”

In 1983, Screech took the path he considered he should have gone down three years earlier, and trained with West Perth, but a recurrence of his shoulder injuries forced his retirement early that year, after seventy games, at the age of twenty six.

Transferred to the South West in his employment, he had a final fling with Bunbury in the 1986 season.

Ken Screech was soon to make his mark in another sport.

Taking up bowls at Innaloo Sportsmens Club in 1990, and giving it up after three seasons to become involved with son Glenn's football, he later went back to the greens after Glenn's junior days were over. Transferring to the Doubleview “Powerhouse”, he played in the Bowls WA's Premier League, and was a busy committeeman at the club. Runner up in the State Triples Championship with Dennis Katuna-Rich and Russell Tyrrell in 2008, he was a member of a Doubleview Club Triples winning side, and was the club's Singles champion in 2010.

Glenn Screech played football with the strong Southport club in Queensland, and has not only outdone Ken by winning a premiership, but won three in the QFL.

A ceiling installer, who enjoyed catching the big ones whenever he could get a rod in his hands, Ken Screech was sadly taken from us recently after battling ill health. Ozfooty wish to pass on condolences to all of Ken's loved ones as well as Subiaco members and supporters.