Spear and Magic Helmet

Not only that, but the players from the River Monsters largely played youth hockey in the area. We talk about college hockey as well.

Was this the coach from the beginning of the season or the guy who was an assistant, became head coach, then got fired after he brought in a bunch of new players?

Predators charge a coaching fee. I don't think it's in cash, but it's significant. Last time I talked to someone there, it was $900-1000/kid. I think this was just AAA teams though. Not sure if they pay any other coaches. But $900 x 15 kids is $13,500. For whatever reason, high school has generally paid better for years. The coaching salaries are not a surprise to me.

Was NHAHA doing well at PIA?? I don't really remember. The rink has struggled for years and some of the maintenance issues and other problems there might have given people a bad impression of the facility. I haven't been there in years, so I don't know if those issues have been resolved. I sort of assume they have fixed some of the more obvious and uglier issues, but people might be cautious of that as well.

Who is the 14U coach? Nick Kuqali is listed on the website, but the website may be wrong.

I agree with that. The drop-off between AA and A is way bigger than the drop-off between AAA and AA. There often are not many A players in the Stellar 6 either. However, there are some really good players in A as well.

The U16 coach is the only head coach who doesn't do private lessons, and I'm not sure if he is going to be back next year. A lot of the head coaches are assistants on other teams as well. Not all of them are part of IC Hockey. Klapper does both on and off ice training: https://aehockey.com/ I can't say for a fact that you don't need to do the private lessons, but the videos they post on IG and YouTube seem to have a whole lot of yellow Preds helmets. I do think they get a bit of a discount on the private lessons and I also do think that they are great skill coaches.

The private schools are mostly in D2, but to your point, the leagues in the east do mostly make the private schools play AAA. And I agree, the best player in the PIHL could be on any team really. I do agree with the other point that they would not put up the same numbers in AA as D2. I don't know if there is really much gap between D2 and A. In fact, the best D2 teams might be better than the worst A teams. What is crazy is the A teams would easily handle the best teams from the 70s...back then, most teams had about 5 guys who could skate and filled the rest of the team with guys they played street hockey with.

https://www.eliteprospects.com/player/764524/ryan-saginaw https://www.eliteprospects.com/player/812047/tanner-heidkamp I think these two would at least merit a mention. Yes, they play "faux AAA", but they are good players at that level, which is still at least as good as PIHL AA.

I agree with this. I have seen coverage of the D2 teams here and there. I do think that it is also true that they are ignored to some extent. It's complicated because there are teams like Meadville that have come back from D2. I believe Baldwin was not in good shape for a while either, but I think they only went down to A. Regardless, you would like to see teams have a chance to come back to the "pure" divisions, even if most of them do not. Most of you do not remember this, but in the 1990s, Connellsville was in AAA due to the size of their school. They were terrible, losing every game by at least 10 goals, once again proving that school size is not the most important factor in whether a school team will be good. The guy who holds the AAA scoring record had something like 20 points in 4 games against them. You would like to have a place for a team like that to exist. I believe that was the original intention of the Open Division as it was called 20 years ago.

Agreed. They even had some AAA teams in the early 2000s. I believe George Ferguson coached one of them. The owner might be out of jail now, but he's probably not going back into the rink business.

There are impure/co-op hockey teams in other parts of the state. There was one based at the Indiana rink a few years back. Not sure if it is still there. The Lake Shore league, based in Erie, also has impure teams. In Eastern PA, there is no umbrella organization for all of Greater Philadelphia like we have with the PIHL, but many of the 6-8 leagues out there do have impure divisions, particularly those based near Harrisburg and Hershey. If there were demand for it, there could be a co-op state championship. However, I think many co-ops are just happy to get a team on the ice. As for other sports, football is a good example because of the number of players you need to field a team. There are lots of co-ops and yes they can play PIAA playoffs. Dane Jackson comes to mind as someone who did the co-op route. It's a lot different for football because there is no option other than high school football. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dane_Jackson_(American_football)

The designations have a lot to do with how much they pay. Tier 1 - players pay nothing. Tier 2 - players pay something for room/board. Tier 3 - pay to play. I'm sure people don't follow the rules exactly, but that's the basic rules. The anarchy of "Junior A" in the late 90s/early 2000s was not really ended by USA Hockey reclassifying the levels. They just pushed some teams out of USA Hockey who didn't want to conform. The NCDC wanted to be Tier 2, but USA Hockey said no and they became an unsanctioned/independent Junior league. I would imagine that the issue for them was cost. They wanted to charge the players tuition, and USA Hockey said only Tier 3 can charge tuition, so they left.

We're not that far from having only A or AAA here too. Back in the 90s, when they started using the AA designation, there were a lot more AA teams. Now there are 6-8 different designations within A, some of which would have been AA back in the 90s. I have friends in Columbus who say the same thing, that there is almost no one in AA there anymore either. Might end up being a bit of a re-categorization like Junior hockey. In the early 2000s/late 90s, there were Jr A, Jr B, and Jr C designations, and it was all over the place. I think (and I could be wrong) that only the USHL and NAHL called themselves Jr A. Most of the Jr teams were Jr B. Jr C was mostly younger kids. At the same time, there was a push in the rust belt and mid west to have "split season" midget hockey, and the response was to have more Jr teams, who were not bound by the split season agreement. Anyhow, the point of the rambling is that I would not be surprised if USA Hockey says there is only "tier 1" and "tier 2" and renders the AAA/AA/A labels meaningless, like it did with Jr A/B/C.

Ha. Probably not. But she is doing a good job. Their content looks great.

I think the more interesting story would be at Liberty University. They have plenty of Canadian players too.

I absolutely do remember that. The school exists still and coincidentally, one of the better players on the River Monsters is a Canadian who went and played there. I also don't know if Life is still a powerhouse or if they even still have a team, but yeah in that era, they were always at Nationals in D2 and won a few times. I want to say that the ACHA might have made it harder for grad students to play. They definitely reduce the amount of eligibility. It was 12 semesters or 6 years back in that era (I forget which) and I know at one point it went down to 10 semesters or 5 years. https://www.eliteprospects.com/player/222041/kynan-tarnowski https://www.achahockey.org/mens-division-1-national-champions-2

Hockey budget size is a much, much bigger factor than school size. They also have a rink on campus, which some NCAA schools don't have. Jeff Docking is a big hockey guy and gets their teams a lot of money. He sort of had a vision like that at W&J, but I don't think he had the support from the administration that he wanted. W&J was a very good ACHA D1 team when he was there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Docking

Perkiomen Valley is a public school and about the same size as the AAA schools out here, but you are right that AAA is dominated by private schools. I don't know what the answer is, but I do think making them play the biggest classification is a good solution.

Let's put it this way, if PIHL can do individual stats, so can PAHL. I'm sure the complaints are happening in PIHL. There is a policy you can put in, I'm sure. I actually thought the issue was a lack of volunteers to do the manual input of stats, but it's clear that is not the reason. Also, to your point about the NHL, I'm in a fantasy hockey league that counts hits as a stat. They have been correcting those totals for the last 3 weeks due to some review the NHL did of the hit stats. So even those guys don't get it "right". I say just publish what you have and figure out some way to deal with things being wrong. It seems nearly universal that people want to see the stats and they would much rather see stats that are 95% accurate than nothing at all. The comment about player names on jerseys, I guess I'm old. When I was more involved, most teams did not have player names on jerseys. I will say though that uniforms have become much more elaborate and nicer...and more expensive. The uniforms I'm thinking of without names on the were owned by the organizations and they were adequate, but not nice. Sounds like that's just the times changing, but I do also feel like the names on the backs of jerseys take away from the team concept.

I agree with the points about Black Bear and AA hockey. I think it's just a matter of time before PAHL is B and their 6-8 levels of A (minor/major, white/gold/black, birthyear, whatever other way they want to divide it). I think the "independent" teams will probably migrate to the black bear leagues because they will let them play AA and there is already some travel built into the schedule, because driving farther means it's "better". In the end, a Pittsburgh division of AA teams is probably not a bad result, but the cost is certainly not going to go down.

It's been years since I've been around ACHA hockey, but my experience matches yours. In the 90s, you were happy to get kids who at least played on a high school team. Believe it or not, playing high school hockey was a much lower bar than it is now. By the early 2010s, those same kids were getting cut. And around the same time (1990s), I do remember ECHL games were nothing but fights. Were they called the Wheeling Thunderbirds at first?? Now it's a legit AA option and even some of the single A leagues are sort of legit these days. I think it started when NHL teams needed a place to put their goalie prospects and it kind of ballooned from there. I'm not sure that the money is a whole lot better for the average ECHLer, but they do offer housing and some other amenities now.

Not so sure that the local team is run any different from the other teams in the UHL. The bit about them going to Senior AAA status is a bit, uh, interesting. The fact that teams do way better at home than on the road is kind of telling. There are Senior leagues in the west, like the Black Diamond League, that would blow the doors off this league. I agree that the social media for the River Monsters is very good. Whoever is doing that should get a raise. https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/bdhl

I agree with that. Plus it's not like the rink will come up in a month. It's a years-long plan to get the rink built.

I agree. The comment about RMU losing to a D3 program doesn't have much weight. I don't see that happening. The D3 programs that were good enough to be D1 programs moved up to D1 a long time ago (St Cloud State, Mercyhurst, RIT, Bemiji State, etc.). The D3 programs left are barely better than ACHA D1 teams, and in fact in many case are not even that good. Yes, the big-time programs are going to dominate, but with only about 60 NCAA D1 programs any given year, there is just too much talent that RMU won't get some. Not granting the full 18 scholarships and smaller budgets will hurt, of course. The comment about the coaches not being the right staff to get them to a better spot, maybe that is true too. But despite the comments about there being too many Tier 1 programs around, there is still plenty of talent in the US, Canada, and Europe for RMU to fill its roster because of the scarcity of NCAA D1 options. I do think an on-campus rink and better facilities will help. It's not like basketball, where there are hundreds of programs & choices. If this option is a little better, their recruits will get better too. I am definitely not saying RMU is going to be a top choice for top 10 draft picks, but calling it a "last ditch" is not really true either. The alumni report certainly isn't as impressive as Michigan's or even UMass's, but it's not like there aren't some good players who went to RMU: https://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/alumni.php?tmi=7731