I can’t speak for other areas, but I’ve long been of the opinion that Dunedin needs to build a solid senior league setup. With a large base of senior aged players (18+) it provides a simple stepping stone from the Junior ranks up into the higher levels. Players who are good enough, move to the NZIHL, others move to a lower ranked league.

And the younger age group teams could compete in the senior league itself for training purposes. Admittedly that didn’t work well with the Junior team this year, but that was because that particular team contains a bunch of spoilt brats, fortunately most teams aren’t that immature.

At the moment Dunedin doesn’t have a very well structured senior competition and usually only one grade, plus it’s treated as a VERY unserious competition and teams aren’t encouraged to enter which leads to less organisation within the league (organised teams leads to less work for the organisers).

If there’s a big pool of players, there will always be enough players for practices to be organised. There will also be extra games organised by the teams and there will be more players available to help pool together to form travelling teams. Plus with more grades there is a simple stepping stone up the ladder as players progress.

The Christchurch SNC has a nice system running and I think that is a system that other regions (and other grades) should be following.

More recruitment of U13’s would be a good idea to IMO. 100+ U13’s would be awesome. Even if only 20% of them kept playing, that would still mean there were 20 kick butt adult players in a decades time. Getting those 100+ U13’s of course would not be easy and I don’t have any ideas on how to improve that situation.

So basically, the solution to the ice debacle for 2010 is for Azzy to head up the night before this years final and knock up little Susie before Johnnie gets his mits on her, then we can have the final on Saturday night next season because none of the ChCh parents will want to send their kiddies to the rink where “that guy” hangs out and so the Alpine ice arena won’t be making any money from their ice disco anyway and may as well stick the hockey on then instead.

Sounds like someone in the NZIHL has just mucked up the branding side of things. It can’t be an “All-Star” game if all the stars aren’t allowed to compete.

Well I got that horridly wrong! And yeah, it was a guess. Looks like Vince was closest this time.