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I think more players is at the heart of what a lot of people are trying to do at Dunedin Ice Hockey.
We used to have three prem teams competing in the southern region. Bigger is always a goal, but there’s no magic button. To lay it all at how Kurt and Cy ran the DIHL is a simplistic answer to a big problem.
That being said, the DIHL we ran at the end of last year (10 teams) is the largest DIHL there’s ever been. But it was large for precisely the opposite reasons that you’ve both put forward. A split grade, rather than an open grade, encouraged players at both ends of the ability scale to compete. It was open to kids, and they made up a large portion of the B grade.
Why doesn’t someone open up the social room after some Wednesday night games. See if people want to come along and have a drink? The way to build up culture is to start it off.
"Ryan":12zmxo4o wrote:You guys are selling me on the size issue a bit. Albeit some of the peewees are quite a bit smaller than both Bode and Kara.
[/quote:12zmxo4o]And some aren’t. My son isn’t yet at the level where he could play in the DIHL, but he’ll be bigger than both of them by the time he is!
"Ryan":12zmxo4o wrote:Perhaps a better approach would be to market the league more heavily to the older players. This was done quite effectively by Cy and Kurt by really pounding away at recruiting new adult players. They also organised a lot of social events which have never happened with the new version of the league, albeit Cy actually organised (and still does I think) social events for a living so was unsurprisingly quite good at it.
[/quote:12zmxo4o]I’m not sure if this is just a DIHL thing, I think it’s a DIHA thing just as much. There was a bunch of beginners from a hall of residence earlier this year, who were close to entering the DIHL, and then they didn’t, and they disappeared from beginners.
I wonder if a student ice hockey club would help, and we need visibility on campus. Take clubs and socs day. It’s great that Deanna does that, but there should be an ice hockey player there the whole time. There could be a varsity A, and a varsity B team in the DIHL. Students (and staff too) are pretty good at socialising!
What we also don’t do, is bring ice hockey out of the rink. We should be thinking about ways to promote the sport to the wider community. How can we use our roller-blades here? What about the winter festival? The DIHL advertising was always pretty minimal when I was in charge of it, but I never really saw it as a way to bring in absolute beginners – I’ve always viewed the DIHL as picking up people who at the very least, have been to beginners a few times. It’s the role of the club as a whole to bring in those people to the beginners sessions.
"Chris":3il7qay7 wrote:I was called for tripping. Granted, i had my stick over the top of the kid’s, but that’s because he was physically too short for me to get my stick under!!!!!!!!
[/quote:3il7qay7]The referees response to this (without having seen it) is: “you are responsible for the location of your stick”. If your stick is in amongst a players legs, then unless the puck is in there, when they fall over, it’s tripping. Players are entitled to free movement unrestricted by their opposition.
"Chris":3il7qay7 wrote:Are they cheap shot artists?
Yes, far far more so than I think most adults realise. As yet another (again not me) member of my team said the other night, the refs don’t even see it because it’s just not something that you expect to see, or is especially visible given their smaller size.
[/quote:3il7qay7]That’s probably a fair comment – little kids are more likely to get away with stuff. But that’s a refereeing issue, not an issue with the players.
"Chris":3il7qay7 wrote:In response to Kyle, two people who I have tried to bully into playing hockey have cited the youngsters playing as being one, among other, factors in why they didn’t want to play, having had bad experiences with kids in other sports in the past.
[/quote:3il7qay7]I couldn’t see a viable league if you took out all the midgets and peewees. You’d lose three high school teams. You’d lose half the bears. You’d maybe end up with three teams. I know that ‘adult’ ice hockey used to be a lot bigger at the Big Chill, and there were about ten DIHL teams made of adults. Even if all the adult A and B graders signed up, we couldn’t have anywhere near that many teams now. We don’t have the students playing, people aren’t taking up ice hockey much socially as young adults.
"Ryan":23odus21 wrote: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.
[/quote:23odus21]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.
There are however a number of people who play in the DIHL largely because there are kids in it – often their kids. In November the peewees will be playing a game against their parents – each peewee has to have a parent on the ice. Some of the parents play, but some will be playing their first game of hockey. It’s a growth area for the sport.
Even if there are a couple of people who aren’t playing because of the kids, I can’t imagine we’re missing out on players overall, at worst it ends up balancing out.
"Ryan":23odus21 wrote: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.
[/quote:23odus21]I can’t recall this ever happening – at least because of size. Most of the younger kids playing in the DIHL are pretty tough. Nick Patchett is probably the smallest, and he’ll bounce up from almost anything. They face rougher play in the peewee house league games than they do in the DIHL. And a bunch of them will be midgets next year, which will be much more physical than the DIHL.
The B grade DIHL has always had great differences in size, and players seem to be fine working around that. It should always, I think, be kept as a friendly, open grade, trying to accept as many people as possible. The young kids are obviously going to be small, but they’re not the only ones. Kara is tiny for example. If there’s a problem with physical size, then shouldn’t there be a tape measure before you step on the ice? Or scales? Why discriminate on age if size is the problem?
I never put the age limit in for size reasons, Ryan might have a different story. For me it was always about skill level, both physical skill, but also basic understanding of the game. It’s difficult to get some younger kids to understand basic things like offside, and that can spoil the game for their team mates if they get blown up every time you go into the zone.
Once there’s an age limit, then you can break it for exceptions. All the kids playing now had the coach consulted when they first signed up to make sure they could handle it. They all understand the game well, can skate well, and play reasonably good hockey. There’s a couple more peewees who don’t play in the DIHL, but they wouldn’t be out of place there. There’s some others who should wait another year or two before playing in the DIHL, it’s just not where they’re at.
And if people are having trouble modifying play because players are shorter than them, they should try wearing my skates for a while!
It always surprises me that people get paid millions of dollars to do that.
I mean, not only do they spend half the game fighting, but they really suck at it.
"Ryan":1ywfppuj wrote:"Chris":1ywfppuj wrote:Happy birthday
Three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven cheers for Ryan![/quote:1ywfppuj]Pi
….
it took me a while to get that
….
Ryan,
[/quote:1ywfppuj]
You’re off the [geek] team. You’ll have to go hang out with the jocks. Sorry.
"Chris":1oxm2u5q wrote:I also think that there is a maturity aspect here. Granted, I’m not yoda-like when it comes to serenity, but recently I’ve been particularly unimpressed by the belligerence and discourtesy of younger players. I’m not talking about mere rough playing either, as everyone knows that I’ve always been a fan of a bit of rough and tumble, but that certainly does come into it as well.
[/quote:1oxm2u5q]The behaviour of senior players, in terms of language, respect for other players/teams, respect for referees, and playing clean hockey, not fighting etc, is typically much worse than peewees and midgets.
I know of one midget who’s been trouble this year, and none of the peewees, I can think of half-a-dozen ‘adult’ players who have crossed the line.
"Ryan":1cw4vr6q wrote:"battered_and_bruised":1cw4vr6q wrote:The other thing with the age is the numbers. We don’t have the numbers to put the age up to 16 min and if you pushed to 18, well then there really would be a lack of numbers.
[/quote:1cw4vr6q]I’d prefer to see the kids competing as part of their rep. teams in the DIHL, ie: Dunedin Midgets field a team in the B-grade. I think this would encourage players to strive to be on those rep. teams and would give them some good, stiff local competition which they don’t have too much of at the moment.
[/quote:1cw4vr6q]I’m fully in favour of this idea. I can’t remember where I’ve seen it before, but it always looked like it worked quite well – juniors play A grade, midgets play B grade. It’s not perfect, but it’d give them more game time together as teams. It’d really hurt high schools however. Those kids are interspersed through several different schools, and high schools is the big growth (and still more potential, there’s 12 high schools teams in the schools competition) area.
I’m not in favour of raising the age. DIHL B grade is a social competition, it’s open to people of a range of abilities, sizes, genders, ages etc. It means parents can play with their kids, siblings can play together, coaches and managers can play with their team etc etc. If you raised the age you wouldn’t just lose the kids, you might lose a lot of other players who play to play with those kids.
If people only want to play with adults then SIHL has grades for that.
"Ryan":2jfc69ff wrote:"Kyle":2jfc69ff wrote:A fairly accurate summation! Henceforth known as ‘the day Ryan surpassed Kyle in geekiness’.[/quote:2jfc69ff]Sorry Kyle, but I surpassed your geekiness a long time before that
” title=”Tongue” /> I think it happened somewhere between researching the synthesis of mitochondrially targetted anti-oxidative pharmaceuticals and the transition metal binding properities of pyrazine/pyridine Schiff based ligands.
[/quote:2jfc69ff]I meant computer geekiness.
Chemistry geekiness, you passed me… well some time when you were at high school, if not before.
It turns out that I was talking through a hole in my head.
Last peewees practice this coming week. Two more house league games (next two Saturdays.
"Ryan":2gcg9lsd wrote:[b:2gcg9lsd]November 2005[/b:2gcg9lsd]
At this stage the site was still coded with Yahoo! Site Builder which created some of the most revolting HTML code ever seen. Kyle Matthews pointed this out to me one day so I sat down and learned some HTML basics, which Kyle kindly told me were utter crap, so I sat down and relearned, then he told me they were still crap, so I learned some more and so and so forth till I decided I knew more than him and chose to ignore him
” title=”Smiley” /> Thanks for the help Kyle ” title=”Smiley” />
[/quote:2gcg9lsd]A fairly accurate summation! Henceforth known as ‘the day Ryan surpassed Kyle in geekiness’.
"Ryan":4rse7ia9 wrote:"Kyle":4rse7ia9 wrote: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:4rse7ia9]Why would they not be allowed to play? Too much hockey on?
Ryan,
[/quote:4rse7ia9]
Not playing at a high enough level for them, encourages them to play lazy hockey. Also, they could get injured.
I’m not saying that they will be banned, it might be that all or some of them could play, just something to keep in mind for next year.
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.
If that does happen, that might require some modification. The gap between the grades might need to be shifted down to make it viable, or the ‘open DIHL’ might need to be looked at again for the first half of the year, with all the 10s and 9s off playing prems.
