Mitch

Release I just got

She’s got nothing but high praise from us when we’ve called her games, good to hear that she’s handling it. As somebody who battled anxiety and social issues my entire life I couldn’t even imagine.

Just so everybody is aware, I just spoke with the league. At minimum right now the Armstrong students are not allowed to attend the games. Tonight‘s game, possibly going forward. There will be a closed door executive committee meeting on Wednesday in which they will rule on further details. As I stated earlier, there are so many moving parts to this that at the end of the day it is a 16-year-old girl that was being harassed verbally. Nobody wants to get this wrong.

I will be addressing this during both of my broadcasts tonight. I was waiting to see what the fallout was before addressing it, as well as get my thoughts together. Embarrassing the league, who sanctioned the game, is only good if there was no action taken and if they are at 100% fault. The officials are a separate entity. The school, pending their agreement with the association, is a separate entity. I also do to not want to call out the players for Armstrong, who by many accounts were innocent in this on the ice outside of not trying to say something to the fans, but you can’t be sure what happens out there. This had a lot of moving parts, and it seems like it was at least somewhat dealt with. At the end of the day I’d rather be right than fast, and I’ve been talking to people that have been on-site.

I might not have a big pull with the league but I just sent something over to the commissioner directly. I hope the league takes it seriously.

This is absolutely horrible. No place for that anywhere, let alone the rink. This is just ludicrous.

Penn-Trafford defeated Thomas-Jefferson 5-4 in double-OT… recap/stream replay up on BurghHockey.com

Haven’t been here in a bit, but this is Brian Mitchell from PHD… saw some posts about our whereabouts and wanted to clear some stuff up.. I usually go crazy from St. Margaret’s through the PIHL finals and then take the summer off, RMU definitely caused some turmoil for us internally as they were what started us out. We haven’t ceased to exist, just a tricky time for us. I have three other things going on, I host trivia and dj as well as my regular day job. The Margaret’s tournament and G/S tournament were a perfect storm of scheduling conflicts, so that didn’t pan out for me, and the other two guys are involved in their extracurricular activities that fell in the same situation. Our RMU men’s beat guy has a tricky schedule too, and a feature writer got into a “conflict of interest” situation due to his involvement in the RMU hockey foundation. The good news is that the league approached us for broadcasting this year, and starting with the finals of the Greensburg-Salem Tournament and continuing through 12 games in October. We’ll be out, maybe not as often, but we’re doing all we can. Thanks for the concern, though!

By what I was told today there’s still a number of things that need to be hashed out on the schedule but what’s on the league site is legit. We were approved to cover games again by the league (including live broadcasts), which we were concerned about counting against capacity limits and are going to try to contact home associations to clear the space. We have to submit our coverage games earlier than last year, however and will be only broadcasting from rinks that have the technical capability (wired-in) until we figure out some stuff on our end, which we will be working on in progress. 2-3 games a week to start. Wifi was horrible for livestream, so we’re going to avoid it. I think it’s something at least

I’ve had my call moved back twice so far, so I’m assuming the league is trying to get their ducks in a row before talking to anyone. It’s getting close to go-time, I would bet.

I know I have a call in with the PIHL this week, I hope to have some official answers. I do know that we are not going to be at as many games (PittsburghHockeyDigest) for obvious reasons, but are offering broadcasting again and pre-determined coverage. I know some of last years broadcasts weren’t very high quality and left a lot to be desired, but I’ve worked on fixing things in the off-season. I was learning as I went and it showed. Hopefully they translate to a better product.

I’ll have the rally in full on the PittsburghHockeyDigest YouTube page to rewatch if needed

Good. I’ll be there.

It’s 10 minutes from home and I’ve got the time tonight. I just don’t want someone that drove 30+ min to be left out.

Think anyone would be offended if I show up for PittsburghHockeyDigest? I don’t want to take up a spot a parent could have but would like to get some quotes

Both Pittsburgh Ice and Rostraver have melted, and I have it on good authority that Center Ice has picked up tryouts from other rinks if they do happen, but are also planning on melting one rink at a time (Minus the Badgers rink, which is already melted anyways to convert to roller) if they remain closed.

So far by what I’ve heard they’re going with the PIAA’s ruling of the two week hiatus, but I’m starting to suspect that we could’ve seen the last games played for the 2019-20 season. I hope I’m wrong, but only if the risk is gone.

We did a broadcast of the Scholastic showcase on Sunday from Alpha for PGH Hockey Digest, best WiFi signal I’ve had all year. Will be back for PIHL competition there. They’re okay with other broadcasts. I called a Vengeance game on last minutes notice to open the season, so I’m familiar with their setup. I used to have a private gigabit router at CIA (I broadcast club Broomball there) but they upgraded their WiFi and we lost our connector port. Tried to do a game two weeks ago and it was one of the worst connections I had. Great people to work with, though. I don’t understand why LiveBarn has an issue there, all signals are Hardwired directly into the internet. As for Alpha.... I’m not sure. The press box has its own internet connections, which confuses me.

I was at Kiski/Indiana on Thursday. 3-2 Kiski in a shootout. I have a recap on burghhockey.com. I know there wasn’t a box score, so I had to use my own tweets

Thanks everyone. I wish we could cover JV too, we tried to cover the finals last year as a beta and a North Catholic game because they reached out. We’re trying more AAA/AA this year so who knows what we could get

Actually just found out about this forum today, this is Mitch from Pittsburgh Hockey Digest. Just wanted to thank you guys for the kind words... it’s rough hours some days but it’s great know there are people who appreciate it!