2025 Malcolm Greene Chace Award Recipient.
Edwin Gardiner was born and raised in Warwick, RI’s Apponaug neighborhood. He attended Warwick Veterans High School where he wrestled and played baseball for the Hurricanes, graduating in 1962. A boyhood fan of HOF catcher, Yogi Berra, Edwin, a lefty hitter, mimicked the Yankee great at the plate and friends and teammates began to call him “Yogi”. The name stuck.
Yogi married in 1969 and he and his late wife, Linda, raised four children, three girls and a boy. Although he never played organized hockey, he loved the game and knew it well, playing throughout his childhood on the city’s local ponds.
In 1970, long before his children were of playing age, Warwick’s Thayer Arena opened and Yogi caught the bug, signing on to coach youth hockey in the Warwick Junior Hockey Association, serving on its Board for over 40 years.
Over his 50+-year volunteer career, Yogi would coach at all levels of the game – mites, squirts, peewees, bantams, midget and at the local high schools, remaining active behind the bench to this day. He will tell you that he especially likes coaching beginners, teaching them fundamentals and watching them grow as players and into responsible young men and women.
During his coaching tenure, he has guided and mentored thousands of starry-eyed youngsters, including many of the top players who sprang from the Warwick hockey program and went on to enjoy successful careers at the high school, collegiate and international levels, as well as in the professional ranks. Today, many of them have followed in Yogi’s skates, inspired to become coaches themselves, including several who have proudly coached alongside him.
Over the years, Yogi has led his local teams to numerous wins and titles and was a constant presence helping to build the New England region’s Yankee Conference Tournaments into one of the most famous and well-organized in the nation. One of his proudest moments came in 2000, when he guided Warwick’s Juniors to USA Hockey’s 2000 National Championships.
Yogi will tell you that his long and storied coaching career has been a labor of love, supported by a loving family and a very understanding wife (friends fondly called her “Saint” Linda).
For all he has done for Warwick and Rhode Island’s youth youth, we honor him with the Malcolm Greene Chace Trophy for his “lifetime contribution to Rhode Island hockey.”