They split AAA into Minor and Major, and you never hear a minor AAA team complaining they aren't major. This flight thing, I think, is an attempt at doing the same. In the end, it really may be a good thing for Bantams, at least. But egos will be hurt.
Except that it is entirely different. Major and Minor are for 100% birth year teams, because that is how AAA hockey is structured around the country and in Canada.
It would be great if there were more birth year teams, but not all clubs have the pool of kids that allow for birth year teams.
From what I've heard, the Flight proposal came about due to "parent complaints" about having to travel to play teams that "weren't good enough to provide competition" and this was in essence a punitive system meant to discourage those teams from punching above their weight class, and simultaneously protecting the top Flight teams from ever having to play teams that are beneath them.
Historically, many of the suspect teams happened to be composed of younger birth year teams, using Tier2 as a training ground prior to their jump to AAA. Of course there have also been an even greater number of teams that were just completely overmatched that weren't these AAA-in-waiting teams, but the feeling coming from the play-up teams is that it doesn't matter if they lose all their games, because playing up to Squirt from Mite, and Squirt to Peewee is seasoning and preparation for the AAA tournaments they will play. They literally have no incentive to stop the practice, and rather than just change the rules so these teams can no longer take a 90%+ roster and play up a division, CAHA came up with this unnecessary Flighting system.
The irony is that it isn't even applicable to Bantam and U16 where the phenomenon of playing up doesn't exist, and it's also ill timed because they are not allowing the Mites to play up anymore (SCAHA rule 19.04)
No 8U aged player may play up.Coming off the 180 degree turn on CAHA weekends, it would have been far wiser to utilize the existing rules for a year and see how things stabilized, but instead we can all once again be test subjects for another CAHA experiment.