Lifelongbender

This is terrible news. He is an awesome human being.

There's an adult LTP program at Printscape arena in Southpointe. No idea what it costs but I've seen them on the ice many times at 8:00 PM or so.

There is no tryout process. You register on the PIHL website (typically in early April for that year's league) and your daughter is assigned to one of the teams with the other girls from her high school. All players from any one high school are assigned together, and the league assigns schools together to try to balance competition and ensure that each team has enough players and, importantly, goalies. The games are usually competitive and the girls seem to pretty much universally love the league. Since it's considered varsity hockey under the rules, they get delayed offsides and they're allowed to ice the puck while killing penalties. Since girls never get either of those rules, it's a new experience for most of them.

Some of us are probably old enough to remember when that rink was a pavilion and didn't even have exterior walls. There's no question it's one of the worse rinks in the region, but it could be a whole lot worse than it is. The worst thing about it really is the parking.

They are geographically named (North, South, East, West, etc.) and roughly geographically put together, but they move schools around into new regions all the time to make numbers work and ensure that everyone has goalies and the like.

That's totally plausible if you add in all the travel costs for an independent team. I know someone whose daughter played for one of the local independent teams in 23-24 who kept careful track and said that cost just over $20k after travel expenses.

That depends entirely upon your expectations, really. There's plenty of good hockey going on in the city. You have to do your homework and understand your player, both their potential and their personal goals. It seems to me that the majority of complaining about teams and coaches on this forum seems to come from parents who think their player is AAA material, going to D1 at least, or The Show. In my experience, most parents who believe this have unrealistic expectations of their players. This tends to lead to unhappiness with coaches and organizations. I'm not saying that there isn't room for criticism of coaches and orgs - there are plenty of both that deserve some criticism. But chasing those extra As leads to unhappiness with teams and coaches, and also tends to lead to unhappiness for players. Just my $0.02.

Don't quote me on this, but I heard that LiveBarn still works at Printscape on a game by game basis. I'd check that JV game. But it will only be available on demand - not live.

Neither of my kids has ever played in Keystones, though I know many kids who have. In general they seem to have enjoyed it. Is it "worth it" to the folks who think everything has to advance a player's chances to get paid to play someday? No. Absolutely not. But in the end it's just a summer tournament. If they enjoy it, good for them. Hopefully parents aren't thinking it's some kind of major exposure to D1 scouts, though.

Yeah, this is true. When I was a kid the only options in the South Hills were Mount Lebanon (and let's remember that ice was so rare in the area that the Penguins practiced there back in the day), Rostraver, and South Park when it was cold enough. I guess you could include that old rink on the South Side, too. We have it much better now.

It's true that Alpha is a mess, but, man, there aren't many "nicer" rinks in the area, to be honest. Especially nicer rinks with three sheets of ice. The truth is that really decent facilities are rare in the region, sadly.

Well, it appears they realized there was another revenue stream to squeeze. I can't speak about whether their service is any good, but I'll say this: out east they own everything and maybe this isn't an issue, but what this means for us locally is that if you are a team whose home rink is a BB rink, you'll have to have both LiveBarn and BBTV if the grandparents want to watch the games, or if, like me, you normally download all the games for review.

If you review USA Hockey rules, you'll see that high school hockey rules include icing being permitted by a shorthanded team and delayed offsides. Amateur hockey had those rules changed under USA Hockey, but they remained the same for adult and high school classifications. The difference between the two is in USAHockey rules.

Absolutely correct.

Admit it - you're just trying to start trouble with this thread, aren't you? 🤣

@nemesis8679 this is a common thread in all the cases you hear about. They often involve well-known coaches or organizations who parents think can help their kids go somewhere. This is not only horrifying but also unbelievable. You'd think that with all that has gone on in recent years in hockey across the country - and the media visibility of the big cases - at least the pro organizations would insist on proper responses to these things. I mean you'd think they'd do the right thing in these cases for human reasons, but certainly they have substantial incentives to do the right things for business reasons.

You have to remember that part of the cost of being in those leagues is that you have to travel E, to Philadelphia, Delaware, and New Jersey, in order to play league games. It's not just the cost of the league itself.

I think this is absolutely true. You can see from the discussions on this forum that girls hockey is unimportant to many. And it's obvious to anyone who pays attention at any organization that, even at the orgs that really care to try to make girls hockey work, the girls are less than a second thought. It was only a year or two ago that basically every organization was giving their girls only one practice a week - at some orgs, every other week - and often they were on Sunday nights. Or late Friday night. The reason for allowing girls to roster on an extra team is simple - to promote girls hockey in the region. And for many orgs the only way to make girls teams happen is to dual roster the maximum number of girls. The proposed rule justification says that it "could cost us a small number of girls teams". It surely will do that. What's hard to understand is why PAHL thinks that's not a big deal as implied by that wording. Of the 25-or-so organizations listed on PAHL's website, only 11 have even one girls team. And every season some teams fold while others arise, so that it's never possible to predict who will have a team or how many teams will be in a division. Because of the small number of teams, almost all girls divisions play reduced schedules - that is, the girls teams don't get the same 20 game seasons the boys teams do. The 19U division this season, for instance, had 12 game seasons. A girl who dual rosters on two girls teams won't end up playing 40 girls games on top of whatever coed schedule they have because girls teams normally don't get that many games and also because they probably won't get to every game for both girls teams either. As for girls missing coed games, I've coached both girls teams and coed teams that had girls who missed games for their other team. As long as everyone is up front about it, that situation is what it is. Normally you are either prioritizing one of the teams over the other all the time, or you make a case-by-case call depending on the opponents and/or the importance of the game. It's not ideal, but it's something teams have been working with for a long time. I'm not going to get into arguments about whether girls can or should play coed hockey at any level. I've long believed that girls should play coed at least through 12U because they get exposed to more players and more teams and there are more games in PAHL for coed teams as well as more tournament opportunities. I've known plenty of girls who handled 18U coed just fine. My experience is that as the players get older teams expect more and more from their players and I cannot imagine that most 16U/18U coed teams would tolerate players missing games because of their "other" team, whether the "other" team is a girls team or another coed team. So honestly I don't think that allowing girls to roster on both girls teams and boys teams is a big deal, because at the 16U and 18U levels girls tend to play for only one or the other anyway. PAHL has to make a choice between parents complaining that their male player is getting discriminated against on the one hand and the viability of girls hockey as a thing on the other hand. Personally I think this whole argument is a waste of air because nobody is really hurt by the current rule. Regarding the Tier 1 rule, it's really not that significant. I agree with it in principle, but in practice I understand that the primary Tier 1 organization in our area generally tries to keep players from also playing on PAHL teams anyway.

If I am not mistaken, one of the things that RMU doesn't like about the Island facility is that it is off campus, and therefore not as easy for resident students to attend games at. This was one of the stated advantages that the on campus basketball arena had over the hockey arena. So I assume they hope they'll get more spectators at an on campus arena.

And her reports on this subject, in particular, are outstanding.

I might be crazy, but I think I can remember a time when you could actually see the gamesheets - or at least all of the game sheet data - on there. That changed many years ago, but I'm pretty sure all of that data was in fact available a while back.

The pros definitely outweigh the cons. I know that Westmoreland uses both internal and outside evaluators.

It's no further than Alpha, or Baierl, or Delmont, or Printscape, from the city. Much less Kitanning or Armstrong or Hess. And it would be less irritating to drive to than Rostraver. If I have learned anything in my many years of involvement with ice hockey in the region, it's that people drive for ice. Having said that, I haven't been able to find anything about this in any of the construction industry sources I use for work either.

If you look at @Wes's original list, one which with I happen to largely agree, you can see that the rinks he says have issues are the ones further out. I have always felt that the refs got worse the further I was from Pittsburgh, and if you think about it, there's a logic to it. After all, how many refs can there be living in Indiana? They have to take the ones that are willing to go there, don't they? In my heart I have always sort of assumed that the refs at Indiana (and the others, especially Belmont, where local teams can get away with almost anything at times) were locals and that's just how it is because nobody else wanted to drive that far.

The MHR rankings are meaningless at this time, as everyone knows. It's silly to be discussing them. But just as a nod to how this board slants towards girls hockey, the Steel City Selects 16U team is #1 right now in Tier 2 Tournament Bound. Pens Elite Girls 19U is #14 in Tier 1 Tournament Bound, Pens Elite Girls 16U is #3 in Tier 1, Pens Elite 14U are #11 in Tier 1, Again, these rankings are meaningless at this time. I specifically doubt that the Steel City Selects will be anywhere near that high in three weeks. Having said that, as long as we are talking about local teams in the rankings, it seems only fair to mention the local girls teams, too.