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Right time to get a bit of activity going on this forum
I was pursuing around miter ten at the start of the week and ran into a few club members and actually had a interesting discussion with them, which we werent able to find a answer to!
[u:2mgiujc9][b:2mgiujc9]Retention![/b:2mgiujc9][/u:2mgiujc9]
Why is it that that the club have strong pee wees, midgets, juniors teams or aged players. And then that gap when they leave school the club seems to lose a large majority of the players if they decide they dont want to or cant play thunder or the like, it appears to be very little for players that have a relatively good skill level, and still wish to be involved in some what of hockey, preferably checking seems to be a common request.
Does anyone have any ideas (apart from the obvious) to the cause of this, or what could be done to keep members, its all very well recruiting put retention is just as important.
I assume you are referring specifically to the Dunedin Ice Hockey Association?
You are definitely correct. This has been a problem for a long time now. There hasn’t been a very good transition for players moving from Juniors upwards as long as I can recall. I don’t have any good ideas on how to improve it though other than making a more coherent league structure from peewees -> Seniors.
Internationally, people who don’t make a senior checking squad out of juniors stop playing (serious) checking hockey. They might play social checking hockey, but most would go into SNC.
DIHA neither particularly wants nor can have that happen, but it would still be difficult to make Thunder or similar for the first time at age 23 or something.
Note, we don’t have strong junior teams – in fact we have relatively few strong junior players. Filling the hole at juniors is probably the biggest thing that the club has to do. There are few answers in SIHL for this question, they have very few juniors, and those that they do are committed to NZIHL teams. So a space for U19s and older who don’t make that level is what’s needed, and someone for them to play checking hockey against.
Ryan, im glad youve picked up the same thoughts as I and many others have around the club and ice hockey in general,
Kyle that last point you make is and would be entirely cirrect and im sure youd actually get a number of people back, or keen to play, that either dont have the time, committment or level to play thunder,
rhys
Yea point taken tom,
But its not necessarily about right now at this point in time, but looking from the past with whats happened and also involving a bit of successive planning like this hopefully the club might be able to use it in the future to keep people interested
"Tom":2gnzeznb wrote:there’s not enough players
[/quote:2gnzeznb]Well that’s not true. I’ve got a list in front of me of 17 players – 3 of them goalies who could play U19s next year, just off people registered this year. That doesn’t include any overage players – U20s or U21s, or any of the people who would be on that list if they’re still members. We could run two U20 teams in Dunedin if everyone committed.
What happens is that people turn 17 or 18, start having to pay for their own hockey, buy cars, discover girls, alcohol, get jobs etc etc. Females can’t play checking any more so they split off to womens. It’s a major time of drop-off in ice hockey for people.
We’ll be working on an U19 or U20 programme for a Dunedin team with the new coach next year. It’s a significant thing that we need to do to bridge the gap between U16 and NZIHL hockey, and allow people more time to develop their skills and play with people in a similar age group.
I guess this issue in a nutshell is … everyone is aware of the issue, but there aren’t any stellar ideas on how to solve it.
A Junior league of some sort could work well – if the numbers are there.
A more consistent social checking league might help transition the players from Juniors into the senior ranks then. Then when they get a few years older and can’t be bothered running around hitting each other, they’d hopefully transition to an SNC league. There’s been a few social checking leagues over the past year or so, but they’ve been a little sporadic which doesn’t help with player retention and making sure people know about it. Again, I think finding players for a league like that might be problematic.
All very tricky problems.
Taking the LONGGGG view … tripling the number of peewees would would make sure that even though many would drop off, you’d still get roughly triple the number of players making their way through to senior level and hence solving the player numbers issue. Of course, that might just mean that the Thunder ends up full of 15-20 year old super stars, but that might shunt some of the older ones off the list and bolster the social checking league numbers. Who knows.
We have tried in SIHL for the last year or (two) to establish a farm team system for Thunder and Stampede. Where Juniors and players of all ages that aren’t quite up to scratch for Thunder can play and develop their skill set.
This will provide a good stepping stone into the elite teams.However there was very limited interest in joining these teams, so nothing has progressed.
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