When it comes to the sport of hockey, Bud Arnold is a man who has proven he can take on many positions.

His 38-year involvement in the game includes being a player, referee, coach, volunteer, statistician scorekeeper, executive and member of several committees.

During the 2007-08 season, Arnold took on even more responsibility, increasing his repertoire to include chronicling the statistics for the recreational hockey league and Whitehorse Minor Hockey League's bantam division (on-line).

He also posted game summaries for the PeeWee Mustangs for the five tournaments that the team participated in this season.

His commitments in the sport saw him being active in the game seven days a week.

"The six or seven months of winter pass by really quickly for me," Arnold said.

"I don't own a snow machine, I don't like being outside in the cold very much, so this really helps pass the time and I feel I am accomplishing something with my time."

Arnold was involved in hockey ever since he moved to the Yukon in 1970 at the age of nine years old.

Both his Grandpa's and his friend's passion for the game turned him onto the sport, while living in Haines Junction.

The games were mostly shinny, but Arnold also played as a forward on a local Atom team that first year in Haines Junction and then moved up an age class to play on a PeeWee team the following season.

"That was all there was to do in Haines Junction basically," he said.

"It was a fairly small community back in 1970.

We had the arena and a long winter, so to pass away the time we hung out there and we got a lot of ice time."

After moving from Haines Junction in 1973, Arnold lived briefly in Watson Lake for a year and then Dawson City for two years.

While in Dawson , Arnold's playing career suffered a setback when doctor's orders forced him to give up skating because of a growth spurt that resulted in him developing bad knees.

The following year, Arnold moved to Whitehorse where he has lived ever since.

Four years after giving up his involvement as a player, Arnold found a way back into the sport as a referee.

He was 18 years old.

The opportunity came up when a co-worker of his mother's, who was coaching at the time, mentioned that they needed an official for an upcoming game.

Arnold's mother knew of her son's knowledge of the game from both playing it and watching it on TV, and she said he might be willing to help out.

Arnold was not only willing, but found his hidden talent and passion for officiating.

Arnold's skills as a referee were noticed by more than a few individuals in the game that first season.

In his first year, he refereed more than 100 games.

By year two, this number increased to just under 200 games and by his third year, Arnold's officiated game total jumped to 256.

Arnold was in such high demand that just about every day he was volunteering his time officiating some kind of hockey at all age levels.

Arnold said officiating so many games helped him resume his playing career in his late 20's.

"I probably could have played (at 18 years old), but then there was no place for me to play and having taken four years off I probably wasn't as good as I should have been," he said.

"So I developed my skating skills through officiating and when I finally did start playing at the age of 27, I was a little shaky on the stick-handling and stuff like that, but I was fairly strong on the skating."

When Arnold finally did get back in the game, it was a result of a friend who asked him if he wanted to be on a team that was being put together in the Whitehorse Recreational Hockey League.

The team was Kodiak Sports and Arnold spent his first three years playing as a forward before making a permanent change to defenseman, which he found even more rewarding, preventing goals and getting assists.

Since then, the team has also gone through a few changes over the years from Kodiac Sports to Hunter Sports, to the Casa Loma Bandits, to Deja vu Music, to Subaru and presently the Kluane Drillers.

Arnold is one of the handful of individuals who make up the core of the team and have been on it since the beginning.

In 1996, Arnold increased his responsibilities to include being an executive member of the Whitehorse Recreational Hockey League, in addition to his playing and officiating commitments.

One-year later, Arnold became referee and chief of Yukon Amateur Hockey and held the position for five years.

Around this same time, he was also asked to be a member of a discipline committee for both the Whitehorse Minor Hockey League and the Yukon Amateur Hockey Association.

One of the biggest challenges the discipline committee faced nearly 10 years ago was getting a handle on verbal abuse and checking from behind.

The main goal of the committee was to clean up minor hockey in Whitehorse.

Thanks to an aggressive policy that involved making game reports for all major incidents on the ice, as well as suspending players who had multiple infractions helped a great deal.

The first season, there was an average of 120 game incident reports, but currently there are normally no more than 20 reports in an average year.

In 2002, Arnold stepped down from his commitments as an executive, but for the past five years he has taken on the role of the league's statistician.

This year, he kept the Whitehorse Minor Hockey League's website up to date, writing up executive information and game summaries for the Bantam division.

Arnold thinks it is important to keep track of player stats in a league or division.

"People like to see how they are doing," he said.

"The kids all love the stats and they like the press they get and the sponsors of course like the press.

If all the divisions were doing this, then that would be a real plus for Whitehorse Minor Hockey."

One of Arnold's highlights came last year, coaching the PeeWee Yellow Cab house league team, which his son, Mike, was playing on.

The team won nearly every tournament they entered and finished the season with a silver medal at a competition in Richmond, after losing in a shootout.

Arnold said the most rewarding part about volunteering his time in the sport is the difference it makes in the lives of the players and parents.

"The biggest reward is the smiles and enjoyment on the faces of kids and parents who had a positive experience from the many volunteers in the community, not just myself, but all the volunteers," he said.

"That's the most rewarding thing.

One of the main reasons for volunteering too was to give what I can to help the community and individuals in sport and recreation."

Arnold will also be active for the upcoming softball season and this will be his 14th year as an executive with Whitehorse co-ed slow pitch.

He has also coached minor softball for seven of the past nine years and will coaching again this season.

Besides being an executive and a coach, Arnold also umpires and plays on a co-ed slow pitch. He has been doing that for 13 years.

Additionally, for the past three years, he has been an assistant coach for the Grade 5-7 soccer team at Hidden Valley Elementary School.