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All good points. In regard to the girls, my friend has a daughter who just decided to play hockey last season at 12U. She is admittedly (and understandably) not very good, and she is moving up to 14U. I've been looking, and I only found three programs even offering girls hockey at a normal, non-national bound level: NP, Huskies, and Badgers. That's a shame. And the in-house ideas are brilliant. When I was a kid, sports were just for fun (like in-house). Like you guys said, when you have competitive travel hockey that takes in kids who belong in in-house, it waters everything down even more, makes it less fun, and forces kids to play at levels they don't want to. And reasons like that are why I asked if there were too many programs. I feel there are more, weaker programs than there are legit, interested players to fill them. If half the programs disappeared, and you had in-house, that could be great.

What I think would help a ton is if there were a few more in-house leagues. This gives kids that aren't as serious or just want to have fun or something to do the option of teams to play on, without the commitment of travel hockey. As it is now, they end up in PAHL. Where some of them (or their families) don't really want to travel anywhere, and really aren't interested in playing competitive games. Some don't want to come to practice. Or have more interests than hockey. So what happens? They commit to travel teams because they're interested just enough to want to play, but not enough to work hard. So teams get watered down. Also fewer "AA" teams (you could say "AAA", too). You have so many AA teams, that most of them have a couple actual AA players and are filled out with A Major players. A Major then ends up having some A Major players, and filling out with A Minor players. Not sure there's a solution to this one though, not when bragging rights of an extra A and money are involved.

No the players are not being served. If the result is this mismatch of talent, someone isn't developing or playing at the right level.

This issue is magnified many times in girls' hockey, where especially at the older ages there are fewer players to fill out teams. Maybe now that so many organizations are trying to take girls seriously things will improve. Until the very recent past most girls stopped playing when they reached 14U or so because of the size differences between them and the boys that were trying to body check them. Hopefully now that organizations are trying to field decent teams girls will not quit the game and there will be more players at the older ages. There are more "Tier 1/Tier 2" girls organizations in the city than there are players who can actually play at that level. The competition for those girls is fierce and I have wondered from time to time if the players themselves are actually being served by this situation.

Would be interesting to look at the numbers to see where some of the Western PA schools would fall if they were in the east. I'd think a handful of AAA schools here would land in single A over there.