I’m not aware of anyone who doesn’t play in the B grade DIHL because there’s kids in it. There might be, but I’ve never had anyone tell me that, even in hearsay, and I’ve hit a fair number of people up to play in the DIHL over the past couple of years.[/quote:14unldjs]

We must be asking different people then ” title=”Tongue” /> It’s not hockey players I’ve noticed this from so much though which I’m assuming is who you’ve been asking to play, but people who have never seen the rink. They’re the ones who seem most off put by it. And I’ve definitely received a lot of complaints/comments from players not wanting ankle biters competing.

Horses for course though really, there’s benefits to all these different routes. I’ve never considered this a mission critical problem hence never bothered trying to change it.

I still think there’s a safety issue there though as no matter how rough a game is, there’s no chance that they’re going to get squashed by a bit fat 100 kg person in the peewees league. And little old people don’t have any choice but to play with big people. And Kara is quite a bit bigger than Nick Patchett I think.

Ryan,

Yeah me being one lol. In all seriousness though, what is the issue you have with the young guys? Other then they are small, do they hackle you? Are they cheap shot artists? Do they get under your skin and piss you off? Cause if that’s the case, why are you playing hockey? I know tons of players that are “adult” and play the same style of play. As for the case of going out for a drink after, as long as I have played, I can’t recall one time where a DIHL team went out and did that. The only guys that I know of who do that are the prems guys after practice. So just clarify why you want this age limit, and give reasons other then their size.
[/quote:1vk5c4v1]

Mainly size and purely from a safety perspective. Some of the older high school players get a little titchy and childish at times but so do the older players, so I don’t agree with Chris’s take on that side of things, besides, we have refs to deal with that sort of stuff anyway, if they do something wrong they’ll (in theory) get punished accordingly and the bad eggs weeded out.

Although I think it would help recruit more players if there weren’t ankle biters everywhere and I think teams would be more social with each other if they could go for a drink after a game. When I played in the league back when there weren’t any kids allowed, it was normal to socialise with your teammates and the other teams after games or other times. But it’s mainly a size issue.

My main concern is with the players who have been given dispensations to play despite being under the age limit, some are only 11 (I think). Thirteen is doable as most of them are getting a bit bigger then (some bigger than me by then). But the 11-12 year olds are just too small IMO. Too easy to get a knee to the head or have someone four times their body mass land on top of them.

Most leagues have age cutoffs and most places have senior leagues.

I’m not too concerned about any of this myself, I’m not big enough to cause major damage by crashing into an 11 year old anyway, more likely to be the other way round ” title=”Tongue” /> but some of the MUCH BIGGER players who can barely skate I suspect would flatten them if they hit them – I’m not necessarily meaning an intentional hit here, more like losing control and squashing them like a bug.

Ryan,

One thing to keep in mind with the DIHL next year, is that if the national league team goes ahead, they might not be allowed to play in the DIHL – either all of them, or some of them.[/quote:20p9jbm5]

Why would they not be allowed to play? Too much hockey on?

Ryan,

One comment I will make is that the teams could have been better balanced[/quote:3dwrufjt]

Balancing teams is tricky. It was totally impossible this time round though as Jane didn’t have any information available about who the players were when we sorted the teams. The three teams we did know about were Jets, Bears and Bullfrogs. Bears and Bullfrogs were a dead heat so that’s worked good. Jets are a bit stronger I think but we’ll find out when we play them I guess. There also wasn’t many people who knew about the players at hand, it was pretty much just me arbitrarily sticking people into teams with Andy piping in on occasion. Normally there’d be a bunch more people who knew lots of the players at hand including Kyle and Aaron. Sharks, Kings and John McG were totally unknown so not suprising there are some major differences in playing level there. These are easy problems to solve for next season though.

The league could be setup so that the league organisers could just arbitrarily move players around to balance teams, but this usually causes friction amongst organisers and players and I hate that approach. Plus it’s not very competitive. Of course if a team is getting ridiculously caned to death the league still has the right to biff a few players in there to stop the 20-0 blowouts, this happened a few times last season when Kyle jumped on the Bears.

The only thing is, I’m not sure how long practices are going on for. Peewees had their last one this week, I’m not sure when advanced finishes.[/quote:1afsr33b]

I’m pretty sure the Peewees have one more practice to go. I’ll wing an email to their team manager Krissi Wood to confirm though. She’s pretty good at keeping me up to date with things peewees wise and she hasn’t mentioned anything about their practices having finished yet – unless I’ve lost an email somewhere (possible).

Ryan,