Puck Yeah,
With all due respect back at you, I have offered up solutions repeatedly, starting with my opinion that Flighting was unneeded at the outset. There were a good number of people who agreed with me. I don't know what level your kid(s) are at or playing. I grew up on the east coast, and youth hockey does quite well there, without flighting. I'd love to know some traditional long standing youth hockey markets where anything like this exists.
For our 2 seasons in AA CAHA has experimented on its participants with radical systemic changes. Should I be thanking them?
If you have all the answers, feel free to provide your world view and correct the things I've stated which were factually incorrect. I'm sure you know more than I do about the conversations I had with various club reps I know who have provided me with information, not to mention the discussions I had directly with a CAHA board member and the coaches of our team, manager and our club President.
I don't think a win or a close game in a Flight 2 vs 8th place Flight 1 tells a story of a strong Flight 2 teams that would have been contenders. Just the opposite. It paints a picture of very weak Flight 1 teams at the bottom of the standings.
I really don't even understand your point in regards to the stats you cherry picked. There were 10 Flight1 teams in PW and Bantam and if CAHA was right about flighting the #8 seeds should have won their games with ease. You bring zero credibility to the argument when the season is over, and you can look at the stats and use them to support your own bias. A lot of people were saying that the flighting choices were wonky during and immediately after the jamboree when the "internal rankings" were leaked.
The Flighting was supposedly necessary so that teams did not have to be subjected to a lot of blow outs of teams that they could never hope to beat or even challenge. If CAHA can't get that right, then the whole idea is a waste of time, because, as you pointed out, there are always stronger teams and weaker teams in any grouping (easily measured over a season by goal differential).
At some point, it just becomes arrogant self congratulation that is often not merited and I find that personally distasteful. CAHA can't legislate parity with 3 teams in AAA, and it certainly can't legislate it with 12 teams or 16 or 18 teams at AA. Your bar for our team seems to be, that we can only be validated if we now win a state championship.
If you don't think an organization is entitled to know before being summoned to the jamboree for an "evaluation" without it being disclosed by whatever decision making "cabal" was involved, that you have essentially no chance of being evaluated as a Flight1 team other than perhaps to win all your jamboree "games", don't you think that should have been communicated to the organization? Maybe our coaching staff might have done some things differently.
Feel free to point me to the information provided by CAHA on how the evaluation would work, what criteria would be involved, and how determinations would be made. I'll save you time -- you can't because there wasn't any.
If people are satisfied with it at U16, they are welcome to that opinion and perhaps this season for U16, the flighting makes sense.
It's a very different age group from U12 an U14 there are plenty of people who think the flighting was rigged in favor of the more powerful clubs who have people with decision making power within CAHA.
In U12, Flight2, our team played 5 other socal teams. Our goal differential was +70 and due to the fact there were only 6 teams, we also played one less CAHA weekend. We played a good number of the Flight1 teams, not just the 8th place team, and we proved in those games that we would have been competitive.
I'm repeating myself, but we didn't get blown out by anyone in the Jamboree. All our games were close, both in terms of shots, zone time, scoring opportunities and final score, and 3 of our 4 opponents went into Flight1 and all made the top 8. If there had actually been an evaluation, we should have been in Flight1 from the outset. There wasn't the legitimate evaluation process that was promised and that should change.
Your posts keep referring to teams in Flight2 as 'A' teams, which says a lot about where you are coming from. Maybe if a AA teams at the top of Flight1 are really only challenged by a team or 2 in their division, the problem is not with the other 90% of the teams, but rather that the top team ought to be moving up instead of complaining about having to play the majority of the division.