First I'll offer some factors that have lead to this situation:
- There are too few rinks in So Cal as it is, and even fewer multi rink facilities. So Cal has been losing rinks rather than gaining new ones
- Covid put a damper on demand, and this has lead to consolidation of programs (Jr Gulls & Ice Dogs becoming part of the Ducks umbrella)
- The Kings & Ducks (The Rinks) groups control the majority of all SoCal rinks. If they don't make rinks available then CAHA can't place weekends there.
- San Diego has undergone significant retraction, suffering a huge blow with the closure of the Escondido Iceplex, which was a multisheet facility capable of hosting CAHA weekends.
Conclusions:
-Overall, the demand for ice time at the available rinks is greater than availability. Youth hockey has to compete with figure skating, public sessions (an issue at multiple community owned rinks) and Adult leagues. Programs that also have AAA -> B level teams can't just monopolize the ice to the exclusion of the scheduling for those teams. A CAHA weekend essentially shuts down the facility for the day time hours.
- Without rinks bidding for weekends, CAHA can't make placements.
--One does have to question what is going on with The Rinks, and why they are not making Lakewood an option. Kings are basically MIA but Toyota is first and foremost the kings training facility and nothing is going to change that.
Options:
#1 Increase socal rink participation via pressure on the Rinks and Kings organization. Spread weekends across multiple single sheet rinks in the same general locale.
- Pressure The Rinks to make Lakewood available
- See if Valencia will take on more weekends. The conversion to community rink may make this less likely in the future
- Utilize multiple rinks (as the Kings tend to do for some of their large tournaments)
For example, you could host a weekend using Pickwick + Valley Ice Glacier + Pasadena. These rinks are all a 15-20 minute drive from each other. It would require some coordination but would be viable, assuming those rinks would be willing to again clear the schedule for a weekend. Pasadena is another community operated rink which might make it hard to get buy in, as the community rinks don't have an incentive or profit motive driving them.
#2: Eliminate CAHA weekends, replacing them with standard Home vs. Away games. To spread the pain, have any traveling team play a game saturday & a game sunday vs 2 different teams. This would still require socal teams to travel to norcal, but they would do it one or 2 times a season. Norcal teams would have a similar burden of 1 or 2 trips, making it somewhat equitable both from a cost and competition perspective.
#3: Eliminate CAHA Tier 2 competition entirely.
In order to recognize the preponderance of Scaha teams, I would divide Scaha in most cases into anywhere from 1 to 4 divisions depending on the total number of registered teams. Each division produces a winner and runner up via league play and playoffs. Top 2 teams from each division would advance to playdowns. NorCal would play only local competition for their league. This actually might encourage more Norcal programs to participate in Norcal Tier 2. You could improve the in-state component a bit by scheduling socal/vs norcal games which would be considered showcase/scrimmages and would not affect either teams league standings. The viability of having these scrimmages available for all teams would really depend on the number of norcal teams there are, but it might be reasonable to offer each team 2 of these scrimmages. SoCal teams would not be guaranteed to play norcal teams in their scrimmage games, but it would also allow for cross socal division games for those teams that don't get a norcal scrimmage.