Stray ball smashes van

On his way home from visiting a friend, Mr Kocsic was driving past Guildford Grammar School on Great Eastern Highway about 3.45pm when a ball flew across the road and smashed into the car’s front grille.

Unnerved at the thought he may have hit a child, Mr Kocsic pulled over immediately and found the ‘flying missile’ lodged in the grille.

He said it had come from a hockey game being played on the school grounds.

Mr Kocsic said he sent an email to school principal Stephen Webber on Monday to alert him of the incident.

‘There is a fence on the grounds but clearly it is not high enough to prevent this sort of thing from happening,’ he said.

‘Until I pulled over I had no idea if I had hit a child or an animal; it all happened so fast, all I saw was a flash of white.

‘Where the ball landed was just inches from the windshield and, if it had hit there, things could have been much worse.’

In his email, Mr Kocsic urged the school to act to make sure such incidents would not happen again.

‘I would like this matter be taken seriously enough to actually take measures to prevent this happening again, before it causes and accident where the next person may not be leaving the scene unaided,’ he wrote.

‘Either the playground needs to be better fenced or move the game further away from the road where it can’t put the motoring public in danger.’

Mr Webber said the school’s occupational health and safety committee had launched an investigation as soon as the incident had been reported.

Neither he nor other teachers had heard of any similar occurrence.

‘We believe, based on the timeline Mr Kocsich gave us, that it could possibly have been after the game ended but we are treating the incident very seriously,’ he said.