OK. How’d your team go this last two seasons Blake? Too many pansies in the team? I suspect it wasn’t a lack of desire to win that led to two wins over two seasons.

The reality is that winning games involves many factors that no one can control. Dunedin U13s have won the last 50 straight games in the southern region. We have the best group of kids by a long shot in any club. Every time we go on the ice we work hard to motivate the kids and play well, setting targets that are more than winning the game. Their last game of the season their goal was to help the members of the team that hadn’t gotten a goal all season score. Not only did they do that very well, they played their best individual and team hockey I saw all year. 23-0 final score, no shots on goal.

Our U16s have spent the last two seasons travelling to umpteen tournaments to play the same two teams. They always beat the combined Gore/Alex team, they always lose to the Queenstown team. The margins for each game tends to be 6 – 10 every time.

The past couple of seasons the Beasts played all through the southern region in SNC. They hardly won a game, but they played reasonable hockey and they represented the club well. They seemed to have a hell of a lot of fun.

In none of these teams is there any evidence that a lack of a desire to win holds the team back. Any time you give a kid an ice hockey top with the club’s name on it and put them on the ice, they’re going to skate hard. We work to appoint coaches with the brains to make intelligent decisions about how to approach a situation. When is a good time to give a backup goaltender ice time, when to put a third line on the ice, when to rest the best players, when to tell players to change their tactics to make a game about something other than winning, or more than winning, or indeed get something valuable out of a loss. These aren’t tactics that are exclusive to us, they’re used by amateur and professional sporting organisations all over the world.

In short, I didn’t put ‘winning games is important’ in the code because I think it’s redundant. It’s always the thing that people want to do most when they approach a sport. Reminding them of the other reasons why people play the game seemed to be more important. The code isn’t something that we’d smack players over the hand with after they came off the ice, telling them that they didn’t play for the love of the game enough, it’s about indicating to many kids, lots of whom hardly ever win a game in a season, and lots who hardly ever lose, that there’s other reasons to play, and play hard.

It’s also a recognition in the club that there will be teams like the Bullfrogs in the B DIHL, who haven’t looked like winning a game so far. I’d hope they’d still finish the DIHL having played hard, learnt to be better players, and enjoyed themselves, and that they’d come back for more next year.

Again, this sort of clause appears in a lot of international codes for slightly different reasons than we have here. Overseas its not uncommon for parents and other people associated with a player to push them to play a game they’re good at for reasons that aren’t about individual or team performances, or about winning. Then you get players playing for the scout in the stand rather than to play good hockey and win the game.

And I should point out a draw isn’t the same as a loss. A draw is one point, a loss is zero points.

I should say, I welcome constructive feedback. If you’re going to fill it with swearing Chris, and attack me, I’m not really interested in whatever content you manage to squeeze in around that.

I wrote a draft code because the Board wanted one in place for next season, and I wanted a draft written now so that it could go out for feedback for members prior to the AGM. I didn’t do it for anyone’s entertainment, including my own.

The alternative was to just put it to the board, which would probably have led to a code which the membership was less happy with. But if you don’t want to be consulted, up to you.

Well I’m not banning anything, the reason it would be going to the AGM would be for the club to sign up to it as a whole. If the members wanted to alter it or remove something, they could before it got approved.

It’s not really a question of whether we can’t do anything. If the club chose to ban drinking during games, we’d just instruct managers and referees to send a player from the ice if they were drinking or drunk. It’s a question of what we want to be in the code and what we don’t want to.

Week three stats MVPs etc here:

http://dunedinicehockey.hellyer.kiwi/spring-dihl-week-3/