ThePuckDropsHere

10 hours ago, HereWithPopcorn said:

Bingo.  And what team does the son of the Rebellion's President play on?  Oh yeah, Lebo.  There is your smoking gun folks explaining the situation.

There is credibility to this “smoking gun”…

Lots of ice time fees just walked out the door from an alleged internal sabotage by the SPR president, giving Black Bear the perfect excuse to take over the SPR board if true, as they have with all the other orgs in WPA. 

Apparently none of the Rebellion 06 core went to Lebo…. They are minimally scattered between Preds/SHAHA or orphaned due to this situation. 

1 hour ago, Wes said:

As a longtime former team manager at the AA level, that does seem very odd... I've never heard of that extreme amount of declines, ever.  I think perhaps 1 or 2, but usually at the AA level I've rarely seen more than a very few declines.  From the teams I worked with the acceptance rate was easily over 90% most of the time, which meant maybe 1-2 would decline if that out of a team of 20.

 

As a few people have pointed out, the significant amount of declines is suspect, 1 or 2 is normal, 11 is abnormal. The Rebellion 06 squad was a solid group that had been together for a few seasons. It sounds like about half the team would have been returning players and half new players. That sounds reasonable considering the Rebellion team was on a similar MHR rating level as the Preds "AAA" team and was one of the strongest AA teams south of Pittsburgh. If some of the "AAA" players felt snubbed, that just shows you the entitlement... The Preds "AAA" team would have been the 5th best Tier 2 AA team in Mid-Am last season.

From what I can gather, the majority of the declines appeared to have landed at Mt. Lebo, which had a low turnout for their original tryouts, which were also held the same weekend as the Rebellion tryouts... So the Rebellion went from 50+ kids at tryouts with a strong returning core, to completely folding in a week... While Lebo went from a few returning kids and low numbers at their initial tryouts to swelling with numbers and having a solid team in a week... Something definitely happened behind the scenes to cause such a drastic shift.