Spear and Magic Helmet

I think you have the right as a coach to ask the question, but the referee doesn't have to respond. I have seen plenty of respectful and productive conversations result from a question, but I have seen plenty that are not. At the end of the day, blaming the calls or the officials is like blaming the YMCA rink for painting the goal lines too close to the end boards. I mean, yeah, it can affect the game, and the home team has a better idea of what will happen, but both teams are still playing by the same rules.

Does a referee truly "owe" an explanation for a call? My gut says no. If you had to explain every single call, you would never finish a game. I feel like people who say that a call wasn't "explained" really just want to yell at the referee to either get the call overturned or intimidate the official into not making the next call. That's not to say that there aren't officials making terrible calls, but, let's be honest, there are plenty of players making terrible plays too and they don't have to hear about it from everyone else in the rink. I haven't looked at a rulebook in years, but when I did, I remember reading something along the lines of the referee only has to talk to the team captain who is marked with a "C" on the scoresheet. The official can talk to other people as courtesy, but the official only has to talk to the officially designated captain.

Heard a rumor that there may have been a shakeup with the coaches too. Some disagreement between the owner and the coach. Anyone else hear anything?

https://cdn1.sportngin.com/attachments/document/af77-3058963/What_is_Junior_Gold_Hockey.pdf https://cdn1.sportngin.com/attachments/document/0022/6821/JuniorGold_FAQ_2012-13.pdf It doesn't line up exactly that way, it's more of an alternative path. Technically, Jr Gold is 18U and 16U hockey. However, in MN, the emphasis is very much on high school hockey, so you only would play 18U/16U if you do not make a high school team. I am sure that there are exceptions to the rule. In general, JV is better than Jr Gold A and callups would be JV to Varsity like here. If you are cut from the JV team, you play Jr Gold if you want to play hockey still. Jr Gold A players do sometimes end up making varsity teams in later years. I am sure there are Jr Gold A teams that beat JV teams, depending on the high school. What is not clear to me is whether you have to be in the school district to play on the Jr Gold team. I think their school districts are much larger than here, so probably they do not have "co-op" Jr Gold teams. However, it doesn't seem like it is something that is against the rules. It also sounds like the JV & Varsity teams are funded by the school districts and Jr Gold teams are not.

Yeah I was wondering that too. Would anyone else take over?

Probably a copy/paste error

Not that this makes it better, but when Junior hockey was really "in vogue" during the mid 2000s, lots of kids played Jr B & C and high school hockey and those are different rule books too... Players adapt. And I guess technically the explosion of Junior B & C at that time was another adaptation, it was a way to get around split season midget - of the rules that were different, Junior hockey didn't have to abide by the split season agreement.

The article may have been updated since you read it, because they do speculate on the others involved: "Dillon Dube stepped away from the Flames on Jan. 21 due to "mental health" and Carter Hart was granted a leave of absence from the Flyers on Jan. 23. In addition, Alex Formenton was granted a leave of absence on Jan. 24 by his Swiss league team, HC Ambri Piotta, and is expected to return to Canada. A multitude of players on the 2018 Canadian world junior team previously either put out personal statements or their agents have issued statements on behalf of their clients, stating they were not involved. Victor Mete and Jordan Kyrou confirmed that they did not attend the gala and were not in London at the time of the incident. The following players have come out either via personal statement or with their agency to say that they were not involved with the allegations: Jake Bean, Kale Clague, Max Comtois, Dillon Dube, Dante Fabbro, Cal Foote, Jonah Gadjovich, Carter Hart, Brett Howden, Cale Makar, Colton Point, Taylor Raddysh, Sam Steel, Tyler Steenbergen, Robert Thomas and Conor Timmins. The following players have stated that they have fully cooperated with the investigation but declined to comment further: Boris Katchouk, Drake Batherson and Michael McLeod. Alex Formenton is the lone player that has not made any comments to date."

I'm out of the loop, but I thought there was some loose connection between the Vengeance and Renegades from their days as the Jr Penguins and Amateur Penguins/Eastern. I guess that is not true?

What is "icing on a penalty kill"? The short-handed team cannot ice the puck? If so, that has been a rule change they were talking about 15+ years ago. Is that just PAHL or is that USA Hockey?

Edina is a Minneapolis suburb. The district has about 8500 students, which is about the size of North Allegheny School District. NA is by far the biggest suburban school district around here, and they don't have 165 kids trying out for their hockey team, which I think is the point someone else was making.

These are all great points. If anything, I would say you need 15 skaters and 2 goalies minimum before you can be forced into a pure situation. I'm not saying 15 good skaters and 2 good goalies, I'm just talking pure numbers. 12 skaters and one goalie can easily end up being 8 skaters and 0 goalies for a game on a bad night. Let alone the fact that with those kinds of numbers, you will have practices with 5 skaters and no goalies.

No way to substantiate this, but there were always rumors of this going on in WPIHL and SHIHL as well. Grades and actual school attended were in question with some players every year. I don't think that the WPIHL or SHIHL really had the resources or tools to investigate all of the claims.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I think you are right on the money there. But in the pre-PIHL days, the enforcement and investigation of roster anomalies was not at all like today. It is fair to say that there were a few teams back then who would have some eligibility issues today.

Don't forget, Bishop Canevin is a smaller school. Probably smaller then when you went there. The problem I see is, if you force them to play in a pure division with 9 players, they will struggle, which will lead to more attrition. The whole co-op thing is a mess for sure, but other sports, like football, do co-ops as well, so it's not a hockey-only problem. The biggest issue in hockey is a goalie. If you have 20 AAA players and none of them is a goalie, you're going to struggle...and if you struggle, then you get attrition, and the cycle continues. I'm not sure that there is a way to solve that, honestly. Problem #2 is that there is always talk of "development", but let's be realistic, a 9th grader who has never skated before is not likely to be a good varsity player in 10th grade. There is a whole slew of other factors like economics, distance from the rink, etc. that matter too...Meadville was once one of the best AAA schools in this area, then in the 2010s, they were relegated to the co-op division when they couldn't field a pure team anymore. The Eastern PA teams, last time I was paying attention, had very different classification rules. Big schools are AA, small schools are A, and AAA is whoever wants to be AAA. It was mostly private schools in AAA. Some of those schools in their single A classification are as big as the biggest schools in this area.

Not to be rude, but I'm not sure IUP's requirements could go down any further. A long time ago (15+ years ago), I had a conversation with IUP's coach about how he'd get a kid to apply the week before classes start and he'd get in. With the declining enrollment at IUP, I doubt the standards have increased.

This may not be true anymore, but way back in the 2000s, Liberty used to only allow students out of their dorms to attend a school event. One way to get kids interested in hockey, which at the time was something like 45 minutes from campus, was late starting hockey games. I have never personally been there for a game, but I have heard stories of a fairly rough crowd at Liberty games. Liberty has an on-campus rink, so I imagine that this tradition is at least partially why they are playing at midnight.

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, there was an ACHA M2 conference called the University Hockey League. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Hockey_League IUP's first team and Pitt were mainstays in the UHL, the rest of the membership fluctuated. Both Pitt and IUP were in the WPCHA, which preceded CHE. I believe that just about all of the teams in the area were in the WPCHA/CHE at some point in their history. Around 2006 Pitt and IUP moved up to M1 and the UHL folded. By then, just about everyone in Pittsburgh was either M1 or M3, so it kind of made sense. RMU, W&J, and SRU had jumped to M1 from M3 a few years before that, and WVU, Duquesne, and Mercyhurst had been M1 for years. I haven't followed the ACHA for a while. However, back in the 2000s/2010s, the difference between M1 and M3 was more the level of commitment by the teams to things like game times, amount of practice, length of the season, etc. Maybe you could it professionalism and just generally how the program was run. The M1 teams were/are generally more stable, and had a lot of non-students running the show, while the M3 teams were often at least partially student run. The talent was definitely better on average in PGH M1 teams vs M3. However, there were plenty of good players on M3 teams and Cal circa 2006-09 in particular sticks out in my mind as a team that was better than most of the CHMA.

In the 90s, it wasn't invite only, but the coaches lobbied players to show up at tryouts. If the coaches had not contacted you, it's not impossible that you would have made the team, but it would be much harder. Keep in mind that in the 90s, many of the rinks were closed for at least a month in the hottest part of summer, and summer hockey was somewhat of a novelty. You might go to a camp or two or play some loosely organized local summer league, but nothing like today. Playing higher intensity hockey in the summer was a big draw in those days because it didn't really exist otherwise. Another thing is, tryouts were in the fall back then. The KSG were a good way to get into game shape. Nowadays, plenty of kids have practices for their teams in the summer and the novelty and expense of a one-off tournament in the summer is a thing of the past. The KSG is now just another thing you can do in the summer. I see plenty of kids going to skills camps and private lessons all summer now, which is easier on the car and probably a better use of the money. KSG at its peak did have a lot of the best players around here, but it was never close to being all of them. The Chicago Showcase was probably the only place where you had most of the best players around here on one team, and of course that process was often accused of being tainted or biased.

I was thinking the same thing. Maybe on a tournament weekend, there would be games over here, but mostly it would just be for practices. Is the new sheet a full 200x85? I know it is probably hard to tell by looking, but many of the rinks that claim to be full sized around here are not.

That is unfortunate that it's gone. Not a lot of indoor roller places around here.

Keystone State Games were last weekend and not even a single mention here. Given how much discussion there is of all other minutia of local hockey here, how far has this event fallen?

Was that an indoor roller hockey facility?

From what I remember, the team actually had a different name and played one game, then folded and became this 2nd team. I think players were not getting paid and the hotel or whatever they were staying in was kicking them out b/c no one paid for their accommodations. John Mooney (yes, LJ's dad/Logan Cooley's uncle) played a game when he was 44 and by the end they were just taking whoever would show up to play games.

https://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/leagues/seasons/teams/0073322015.html Just to further your point - 2014-15.