One of the prevailing themes of this forum is that the pool of 'AAA' caliber players at Squirt, Peewee and Bantam is infintesimally small. The fact that we are talking about the entire state of California and that the geographic barriers and exorbitant travel costs are a significant barrier to a substantial portion of the available pool of players, makes this even more curious, but despite what many claim, competition seems to raise all boats if you look at the '05 year. I also see signs that this is also happening at the '06 year.
It was the case through the Squirt and Peewee minor years, that one of the 2 AAA teams was better than the other, and there was even movement between the 2 teams, especially coming into this year, with the "stronger" team picking up a few of the top players from their opponent. That would lead one to believe that the other team might be going down the drain.
Well a funny thing happens when kids play a sport. They grow, and get better at it, and some kids figure things out and get bigger and stronger and if there is good coaching, they might even learn more about how to succeed as a member of a team.
And in some cases, kids developed into capable AAA caliber players when perhaps in the past they were not thought to be able to play at that level by Cal hockey observers. This year we have a Bantam AA club team that is routinely beating AAA teams. But by all means, hopefully enough impediments can be put in place, and punishments handed out to any team that might lose to a team that is significantly better than they are, because that must mean that the kids on that team are garbage, and will never be able to hang with the better kids.
These predictions work best when you create a system that does its best to keep local teams from playing each other, and discourages the idea that teams might have competitive fluidity across the boundary created by the number of A's or B's in their division.