Spear and Magic Helmet

4 hours ago, Law said:

Spear, not entirely true about all local ACHAM1 teams. PITT is ranked 14th in M1 and finished ranked 20th 2 years ago. Didn't play last year. Think you would be surprised if you went to watch them.

You are right. I was being overly general. As @Danner27 mentioned Pitt, RMU and IUP are stronger than the rest of CHMA, The lower teams in there are not great. A #14 ranking for Pitt is pretty impressive actually. I hadn't noticed that before and there are some good teams below them in the rankings.

Cal is perfectly happy to the the big fish in a small pond. I think that helps their recruiting as well. Cal has kids who go to school just to play hockey. I haven't seen them play in years, but they would have won the CHMA in their heyday and then probably gotten crushed at M1 nationals.

20 hours ago, Danner27 said:

I haven’t seen much varsity this year but what I did see last year definitely was not as good as the past. The pihl to me, looks like it’s been on a steady decline year over year for sometime. That’s probably a different topic. 
 

ACHA is a mixed bag. I’ve seen very weak M1 teams.  I’ve seen M2 & M3 teams that would beat up on a good amount of our area M1. Sometimes ACHA classification doesn’t make much sense. 

Agree HS is worse, but that's often due to the fact that many of these teams are barely hanging on. Most of them don't cut anyone, they just take whoever they can get.

In the ACHA, the M1/M3 designation is really more about how organized the club is than anything. The local M1 teams are, at best, middle of the pack in M1. They often get blown out when they send a team to nationals. The M3 teams, at least the good ones, are among the best M3 teams in the ACHA and have decent showings at nationals. Now, if these teams played each other, they are probably about the same quality, though Cal had some teams around 2005-2010 that would have blown out the local M1 teams.

Anyway to read this where it doesn't look like it was copy/pasted from Excel? Very hard to read this. 

On 1/3/2022 at 1:52 PM, Pa Hockey said:

From the Peters 2003 Team alone Trax - Clackson - Clackson - Minella - Schwartz played 3 or 4 years HS

 

Who is Trax?? I assume not Eric Trax? I remember him playing for the Forge, and I'm not sure Kevin Constantine would give him a night off to go play high school hockey. The Trax family is not a small family and they have a lot of money from their farm (and selling parts of their farm to developers), so I guess there might be another Trax I'm forgetting.

https://www.eliteprospects.com/player/81360/eric-trax

19 hours ago, Danner27 said:

I knew about clackson & minella - Schwartz played acha. I didn’t know about the two QV players. So we are roughly at 9 players over the past 20 years. Some of these players go back to the old hornets days when you could play both tier 1 & Varsity. PPE has put a stop to that.
 

Again, the point is - there are very very very very few ncaa d1 capable players playing western pa varsity hockey. 

 

I forgot to say, the guys from QV are Furman South and his brother Colin South. Both played at RMU. Furman is now an NHL official. Also, to further your point, neither was a defenseman.

1 hour ago, Danner27 said:

I knew about clackson & minella - Schwartz played acha. I didn’t know about the two QV players. So we are roughly at 9 players over the past 20 years. Some of these players go back to the old hornets days when you could play both tier 1 & Varsity. PPE has put a stop to that.
 

Again, the point is - there are very very very very few ncaa d1 capable players playing western pa varsity hockey. 

 

Those Peters teams from the early 2000s  were loaded... depending on the day. I think Christian Hanson played with those guys too. Not sure. But if you played them on a Friday, they'd be down like half of their roster. It was ridiculous how many Friday night games those guys had. It's gotten way harder to play tier I and high school more recently for sure, but you also have to consider that a lot of the guys who end up in D1 are playing Jr while they are in high school. 

7 hours ago, Danner27 said:

That montour run was the product of two players for the most part (yes - they did have a supporting cast - this isn’t a slight at the other players - it’s pointing out how good these two players are)

One defenseman who played in the NAHL right after HS who is now playing NCAA D1. One forward that started this season in the NAHL who is now playing in the NCDC. 

last season they didn’t do as well once the defenseman was gone but the forward still carried the team as well as he could to a playoff birth in class AA. 
 

the coach that quit really had nothing to do with the success of that little window. Any parent could have been on the bench and got the same results.
 

How many varsity teams have an NCAA D1 capable defenseman ? None ? You have to go back a long way, bartkowski ? Cliff ? These are class AAA schools. Maybe our resident historian will give us the data. Add the stud D with a dynamic “elite” forward - they ripped through class A to win the penguin cup.

All great points Danner. I do not know of any more recent teams with NCAA D1 capable D1 in recent memory. 

What is the NCDC? I had not heard of it before you mentioned it, but it is interesting that it's a "tuition free" junior league. I'm way out of the loop, last I remember was everything got tossed into tiers and other than the USHL (Tier 1) and NAHL (Tier 2), everything else was Tier 3 with A, B, and C designations. I'm not sure where the NCDC fits in with all of that.

https://www.usphl.com/ncdc

I just checked the Twitter. Not a good look in some of the tweets. Probably a better way to address it than using Twitter. 

https://twitter.com/cshell371/status/1474214207398760450?t=6fCvSl_zdzjQOW_AQVOPHQ&s=19

Previous Montour coach sounds like a class act

Just saw in the Post Gazette that RMU hockey will be back in 2023:


https://www.post-gazette.com/sports/rmu/2021/12/17/Robert-Morris-reinstates-hockey-programs-for-2023-24-season/stories/202112170125

33 minutes ago, Danner27 said:

The airport beer league was insane! Half the people didn’t even goto play, they went for the party. The rink would shut down to the public after the last game, they would party all night! You would have guys driving 2-3 hours from Ohio and upstate NY to attend those parties! 
 

I don’t know when the acha naming change happened, but as long as I’ve followed it (10 years give or take) it’s always been M. I would guess since NCAA hockey has grown so much since the 80’s & 90’s, the NCAA probably had something to do with it, possibly to distance itself from club hockey. When I hear a parent say “my kid is playing d1 at X college” - what I hear is “my kid plays AAA hockey at the predators” or “my kid plays junior hockey” when it’s tier 3. Same parent mentality, you probably get my drift here. 

I’m not bashing club hockey at all. Some of it is very good hockey. Some acha teams can and do knock around ncaa d3 teams (some ncaa D3 programs are a complete joke, bad hockey - the team is just a school recruiting tool to get the wealthy parent to pay for a title) The top acha programs treat their student players like ncaa athletes. It’s great to keep kids involved in the game, helps to keep them focused more at college, possibly out of trouble etc. If you didn’t notice the post, I’m trying to get two corporations to donate towards a scholarship fund for the Cal U acha program, a program I don’t know one single person involved with. It’s a tragedy what happened, it’s great the school wants to honor the young man, along with the club sport. Personally I think some of these bigger companies donating big money to the RMU NCAA fund should get involved in the situation with Cal U and club hockey In general. but a lot of the people involved with the RMU donations have an agenda to begin with. RMU is a private university, they have the endowment, funds and alumni to reinstate that team if they really wanted to. It really never had to go away.  I guess in a sense they are forcing some of their alumni to put up the money. Don’t send your kid to rmu people. 
 

sorry rambling on, showing my age again.

I did see your post about the Cal U tragedy and I do hope you get something to them. That is really nice of you to do.

I think the transition to ACHA "M" was gradual. I think I'm just old too and can't learn new things!

23 minutes ago, Danner27 said:

trust me buddy, I’m not jealous of you in anyway at all. You are the historian book writer, you should put out the truth, not spin it for your own ego. Again it’s ACHA M1. 

I have heard stories about those Airport tournaments!

It's been years since I was involved, and you are technically right about ACHA M1...However, way back before there were women's teams in the ACHA, they were officially referred to as divisions and therefore D1, D2, and D3. This is years ago since I was involved, so yes, I'm sure you're right the names changed, but there are probably other older people like me still saying D1. This link is to the ACHA website from 2005 - notice they say D1:

http://www.itsportsnet.com/league.php?scriptName=HOME&leagueID=7700

Is schenley park a full sized rink now?

It's one of Culver's lower teams that plays in tournaments like this. They have 4 teams, and the high school teams are the lower two teams of the 4 they have. That being said, they are still sending very good teams. Culver definitely recruits and have had quite a few alumni play in the NHL as well as NCAA. No idea how SSA compares to Culver these days. In looking at SSA's schedule, they have a lot of open dates and seem to have games scheduled only against lower-level prep teams. I have heard that program has struggled lately, but even at their height, they were not a powerhouse.

https://culverathletics.com/sports/2019/7/12/culver-in-the-nhl.aspx

On 11/29/2021 at 3:27 PM, hockeyisgreat said:

Total attendance for the 3 games?  Or total for each game?

https://www.post-gazette.com/sports/high-school-football/2021/11/26/WPIAL-football-championship-notes-factoids-2021/stories/202111240007
 

According to Mike White, they usually sell tickets that are good for all of the games, but this was the first time they had games on separate days and had separate tickets, i.e. a ticket for Friday's games and a ticket for Saturday's games. I can't find a figure for the sales on either day, but I imagine 12,000 for the two days is on the low side. A lot of these high school teams fill stadiums seating 2500 or so people. With 10 teams worth of people, you could imagine there might have been 20,000 tickets sold for the 2 days.

1 hour ago, aaaahockey said:

People who use public transportation are going to rent enough ice to sustain this full time, year around?   Or the Pens have that much programming?   

I think they only plan to have ice until March. 

That's six As, must be twice as good as aaa. 

18 hours ago, Eddie Shore said:

All of what you said backs up the claim that Pittsburgh is not a hockey town.  Schools don’t support it, the area doesn’t support it.  Pitt won’t have NCAA because there is no support for club (by the area or the school).

I agree Eddie. Pitt will have an on-campus football stadium before they have an on-campus ice arena. There were rumors that Lemieux approached Pitt about adding ice making equipment when they were building the Peterson Events Center. There response supposedly was no and the reasoning was they wanted the Penguins to leave town so there would less competition for the basketball team. Given the state that the basketball team is now, I am sure they aren't interested in spending the money now to retrofit the building with ice.

4 hours ago, HSFBLJ said:

We should start by having hockey recognized as a sport and not a club activity.  Once we have that we can have schools provide transportation to the games.  Once schools start to provide transportation to the games you could fill the bus with students who want to go to the game.  Possibly add a second bus if needed.  If you have ever been to Div 1 game most schools also have a band at the game, at least a Pep band.  Why don't schools send a Pep band to the games at least the playoff games?  I can tell you the local High School band director was sent an email about doing this and we heard cricketts back.  

PPG is a great venue but unless you can fill the place some of the atmosphere is lost.  It would be really cool if Pitt had a D1 team with an on campus arena.  Maybe Pegula would be a great venue for the State Championship depending on who is playing.  Smaller venue would be better IMO if you can fill it up and get the place rocking.

People have been trying to get hockey recognized as a sport for probably 50 years. The fact that lacrosse and field hockey are sanctioned despite coming along much later is not encouraging. Even niche sports like rifle, bowling, and water polo are PIAA sanctioned. The schools could do more on their own, but most schools do not, even at the schools where participation is (relatively) high. They are definitely not banging on the PIAA's door demanding hockey be added. I have a feeling they are discussing adding e-sports though.

I just don't feel like many people outside of hockey really want to add hockey. Plus I don't know if hockey wants it anyhow. You'd have to have the season run from November to February. That's half as long as the season is now, and the length of the high school season around here is a huge reason why split season amateur hockey will not work. I don't know, it just seems like there are a lot of issues that have never been resolved and aren't likely to change.

48 minutes ago, forbin said:

Without derailing this thread to oblivion. I loved going to those games. That was pre Crosby era and I think a NAHL team would do better in Pittsburgh now. Make the tickets cheap, make it accessible, make a youth program that "feeds" into it and name it the same as the team like  Jr. Forge or something and people would be ALL about it. Pittsburgh may not be a "hockey town" by other standards, but something like that would generate a good amount of buzz for the sport. UPMC already hosts the USHL Fall classic. I am positive some conversations have been held about bringing a junior team here. 

I agree. I might add that it would be a much better use of the Penguins' money to get a USHL or NAHL team here.

I have seen pictures of the rink on Facebook. I think it actually is on schedule to open at the end of the month.

All great points here. To be honest, I think the person who mentioned the Jr Flyers and PPE has the right idea. Most high schools on this side of the state have barely enough kids to have a team, if they have one at all. Amateur hockey doesn't have the problem of school boundaries. In my time, I've seen lacrosse go from a niche, club sport, to fully sanctioned. So it's possible to see, but unlikely given that there are so few kids playing HS hockey. It's a lot of resources to invest in a small number of people. 

What schools are playing?

On 10/30/2021 at 6:36 AM, hockeyisgreat said:

The only team I see that moved out of AA is Baldwin. Am I missing something?  I thought the PIHL was set up so that teams who dominate their division move up and those who struggle move down to maintain competitive balance.  The Divisions also seem to go along enrollment lines as well although that also leads to more athletes to chose from.

I feel like enrollment is should not be the only criteria for divisions. Certainly, it can matter. I mean QV vs Mt Lebanon, sure, Lebo has an advantage. On the other hand, Ringgold is a huge school, but there are not many hockey players there. 

Here are mine for D2:

Carrick
Bishop Canevin
Ringgold
Burrell
Avonworth