Here is a CAHA snippet
Member League Clubs are not permitted to form independent teams that solely participate outside of CAHA sanctioned league play.
I don't think anyone was suggesting forming independent teams. The only point was that T1EHL will go on, so there will be at least 3 existing teams in the state playing games. CAHA certainly wont get in the way of that.
Absolutely, the best hockey players tend to be the best natural athletes. I think that's very different than 'playing multiple organized sports', which is where a lot of people get it wrong. For a player taking hockey seriously at the 15+ (maybe 13+) AAA level, it's actually very difficult to commit to a second organized sport. Hockey is a 10 month a year sport (unfortunately) at this age and level. It starts with practices in August. The season (hopefully) goes to March if you make districts. There is typically about 4 weeks off at that point, then you are in to prep for tryouts and tryouts themselves.
After (or before) that, if you are good, there is probably one to three summer events worth going to - the WHL combine, the USHL combine, and then later at the 16+ point, main jr team tryout camps. Plus a lot of the better kids will do a weeks skating camp during the summer. So there is some summer time off, but if you want to look good at those camps you are still practicing.
And yes, people will bring up the occasional example of kids that did well while skipping all camps, because most of them ARE money-grabs, but the reality is that most top end kids attend at least one or two carefully selected events every summer.
This all makes it very difficult to commit to another team. And a lot of these events are still going on this summer - certainly all the main jr camps are happening, and there have been California players flying out to attend them. What I've encouraged is for my kids to pick a main sport, and then an individual sport that can be 'fit in' to the gaps.