Because this whole system is set up to curb the placement of A teams in AA. Why should the flight I Team have to travel for this game, especially when they already beat out two other flight I teams for 8th place? There’s no way to do this and make everybody happy.
That's just completely incorrect, sorry. The system was set up to keep the "elite" AA teams from having to play the teams that would traditionally be in the 9-16+ territory in the league. There was already a system in place to force down teams to A. Since my kid is on his 2nd year of PWAA, I can tell you that last season there were teams that dropped to A (2 or 3 as I recall) and the same thing happened this year.
The main thing that people probably don't realize is that for the most part the flights were picked prior to the Jamboree. I verified this over the course of the season. The Jamboree was not an evaluation, but rather selected games meant only to reinforce the seeding they already had formulated. For example in the case of our team, we played 3 of 4 teams that ended up in Flight1, and in fact all 3 of those teams made the top 8. We lost those games by 1 and 2 goals, while putting up equal shots. We outshot the team we lost to by 1 goal and carried a lot of the play. The other flight2 team we beat by 6. Didn't make a difference, because the assumption was that we were supposed to be a "mid flight2 team"
We were under the impression at the time, given CAHA's minimal information on the matter, that it was an evaluation, so in that sense, there was subterfuge involved. If people had known where they stood, there might have been a chance to clarify misunderstandings or challenge the seedings. I also think that people would have done a lot more questioning of the time and money invested in the Jamboree given the format. We played one Norcal team at the Jamboree, BTW, and ironically that is the team we have to play for the play-in game. Speaking of which, said game was also in flux as to the location and time as recently as yesterday with the game this SUNDAY. The whole play-in idea, is not well thought out, nor impartial nor well planned, unless you like the idea of having to either buy plane tickets or drive 6-9 hours for a game with 6 days notice.
Depending on the stature and presence of the individual clubs, some teams ended up getting preference they probably shouldn't have. Those who complained about this from the outset were proven entirely right by some of the flight 1 selections.
I understand that in general the flighting got more rankings right than it did wrong, but that doesn't justify the mistakes or the general message this sends to people stuck in the middle of this mess. PW flight2 ended the season with the top team having +80 goal differential in only 15 games. That's a pretty big evaluation fail. We will never know whether this team would have made the playoffs if it had been in Flight1, but it seems possible given the small sample size of scrimmages and SCAHA games where they played Flight1 teams in some close games.
But the biggest issue is that after teams had already signed up for PWAA when this was launched, and the end result is that we might as well have just stayed within SCAHA, as there wasn't a single Norcal team in flight2. CAHA has been tone deaf from the start, in forcing us to travel to Vacaville and play each other.
A CAHA rep told me they are going to "improve things" next year
