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It is good to see the parents of players mentioned in this thread are propping up their own kids for the attention and kudos they rightfully deserve.

It's more likely the kids themselves

Here were the scores of Day 1, summarized. I'll try to update daily. Wednesday, March 29 12:30PM 15U (9) Pens 4 vs. 2 (8) Mid Fairfield Jr Rangers 2:45PM 14U (10) Vengeance 2 vs. 5 (7) Buffalo Saints 4:15PM 16U (11) Barons 1 vs. 2 (6) Detroit Little Caesars 4:30PM 14U (3) Pens 3 vs. 2 (14) Valley Forge 5:00PM 18U (6) Pens 1 vs. 3 (11) Buffalo Regals Also, the times I posted above are local times. With some of these sites being in different time zones, if you do have an interest in a game in particular, you might want to double check the website.

I think it only happened once in my coaching career (12+ years as head, assistant coach in youth hockey) where a player who played for us the prior year was injured for tryouts. He broke his arm playing lacrosse just before tryouts. Luckily, he was the 2nd (maybe it was 3rd) leading scorer on the team the year before. We got approval from the board of our organization to offer him a spot without skating at tryouts. The organization still made his family pay the tryout fee (to get him in the registration system, they said) and he showed up and was on the bench during the skates. No one complained (that I know of) that he got a spot because he was known to be one of the better players. I doubt we would have taken an injured player from another team without trying out unless that player was known to be exceptional. If the injured player had been in the bottom half of the team, that would have made things much more difficult - probably would have been a judgement call based on who showed up at tryouts. So, yes, call the coach and let him know and go from there.

I saw the 09 Mustangs play a few times this year in 2 close games against the 09 Shaha team. They're a really good team. I saw they beat the Badgers 09 team 3-0 this year so I agree they would likely have won that AA Minor PAHL division. I'm not sure how they would have stacked up against the top AA Major teams. They should be in contention at Midams next year at Tier 2 for sure.

The 09 Mustangs would win PAHL AA fairly easily. Just like every organization, you have to look at it on a team by team or birth year by birth your basis. A blanket statement like yours just isn't true in all cases. For some of their teams, it's absolutely true.