A former Hamilton hockey coach and long distance trucker with a 20-year attraction to teenage boys has been handed six years in prison after being found with one of largest collections of child pornography in city history.

Bruce Holmes, 48, admitted he was embarrassed and ashamed of conduct that saw him plead guilty in September to four pornography-related charges, including one of luring a 14-year-old Brampton youth to pose naked and have sex with him in the cab of his truck.

Holmes, who was given credit for 323 days of pretrial custody after being arrested at his uncle’s Connaught Avenue home last November, was found with more than 754,000 pornographic images, most of them depicting youths having sex with men.

“It’s the largest cache of images this court has ever seen. It’s some 700,000. That’s huge,” Ontario Court Justice Marjoh Agro said of the collection.

“This is a shocking cache of perverted material,” the judge said in bringing down her sentence.

Assistant Crown attorney Stan Dudzic, who asked for a four- to six-year prison sentence, said Holmes told police he had been sexually interested in teen boys for “at least 20 years.”

He also said Holmes had served as a trainer/coach with bantam hockey teams in Toronto and Brampton “but felt he had no conflict with his interest in teen boys.”

Defence counsel Stephen Bernstein, who noted the “sheer volume and type of material is alarming and disturbing to the court and would be to the community,” sought four years or less for his client.