hockeygod wrote:bringing kids up to play with the varsity has been common when sports are in there infancy, it happened in the early years of boys hockey, it happened in alot of girls sports in the early 80's and it's just one of the growing pains that the girls hockey has to endure. As a coach you can't say we'd rather be a co-op than have younger girls fill out the JV or go without a team because you may have to work harder on skating skills than you want. If the sport is going to grow it has to all inclusive, make everyone feel welcome and worry about how to teach them later. once a team has the numbers then the u12's and the u14's will fill out but until that happens we will have to endure haveing young players coming up and the coaches that win will be the true teachers out there because those will be the ones that will draw the interest o fpotential players. and future fans
I've never cut a single kid and I've probably recruited more non-hockey players at the HS age bracket than many coaches I believe. Participation is important, but how do we address that we have too many spots for too few kids? I don't believe that when participation counts are done that we should just neglect the fact that U14 hockey exists. Growing pains? Yes - but you will never have the numbers at 12's or 14's if you always have to take them to HS - JV or V. The "if you build it, they will come" mentality was great and is the reason why we have girls hockey today. However, if over time the numbers become constant you can't continue to employ a model that assumes that they'll continue to increase and eventually fill in underneath the top-heavy too many HS team setup that we currently have that has no choice but to pull youth eligible kids up year-after-year to populate its ranks.
What we need is to reevaluate and adapt to the truth. We're not creating solid top youth level opportuntities as a result of too many HS teams.
What are the options?
1) Do away with U14 or JV, but not have both.
2) Co-op HS V (and JV teams) to try to keep U14 level hockey stable.
3) Use some arrangement of 1 & 2 to ensure that there is a more 1-to-1 relationship between HS teams and youth programs - i.e. one youth program should not feed 2+ HS V teams, etc.***
***And we also need more co-op work by youth programs to field A & B teams at each age level (age & ability appropriate teams as cited before)
What I think we would see if we first forced youth assn's to co-op to have age & ability appropriate teams is that the number of such youth assn's would mean less youth assn's standing alone, and subsequently if you then say that there should be a 1-to-1 relationship between youth programs and HS programs, then, you would see less HS teams too obvioulsy.
Where does this NOT work? Anywhere outside the Metro where maybe they can't co-op due to distance, etc. In the metro though there is no excuse for why HS & Youth programs shouldn't be able to co-op when they can't A) offer age and ability appropriate youth teams and B) have their HS teams (JV &V) predominantly comprised of HS aged players.
Exceptions - 1) when youth players being needed to play up is short term vs long-term or ongoing issue, and 2) when teams have a player so gifted & talented where (as has been done forever) they should then be elevated due to their individual talent. Note - 2) is not a situation where the kid is being elevated for continual team need for young players, but instead about the individual talent warranting early participation at the HS level.
I say all of this having had programs/teams that have both been the exception and also some that weren't. I've had some of the youngest HS teams ever. I just think that there are some programs that aren't the exceptions that may benifit from working together.