Time for a Boycott?

[B-Real]

With 14AA slated to travel up North 5 Times to play Southern California teams. Five times out of seven.
CAHA is placing the blame on the Local rinks.
The Consumer is taking the brunt of cost for travel and kids missing school.
If the teams /clubs we pay dues to, if they do not want to take action against our clubs.
Is it time to band together as hockey parents and Boycott a CAHA weekend to send the message that this scheduling is unacceptable?
If you figure an average of 2K per weekend with travel, hotel and food. You are talking an additional 10K to play a season of hockey. Only to play the same So Cal teams up North.
https://caha.com/tierIIweekends.pl

[lcadad]

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. 

[Knuckle Puck]

#4 play adhshl or lakhshl -- seems like that's what those two orgs are pushing you to do anyway


#5 leave the state

[Landshark]

If you're thinking about doing 4, you should definitely do 5.

[lcadad]

#4 play adhshl or lakhshl -- seems like that's what those two orgs are pushing you to do anyway

#5 leave the state

With the Kings, the "high school" league is more of an alternative path for people who aren't interested in travel hockey.  It's a path to make money off that market segment.


Since this is the Bantam board, I also have to point out that 14u isn't old enough for High School.  The Kings did allow kids that age to play, but they pulled back from that, probably for liability reasons.  I'm not sure what the Ducks league allows.  I wouldn't encourage too many people to have their 13 year old sign on knowing they can be playing against 17 and 18 year olds.


Tier 2 issues certainly haven't helped the exodus of players, but lots of Tier1 players were already leaving, and CAHA weekends don't factor in for those people.   

[Landshark]

You're my favorite calhockey poster.  All four corners. Well done.

[Beer Leaguer]

My son was 14, played AAA and for his High School team. I believe the rule is 8th graders can’t play varsity. If you can make both work there is I encourage it. His experience with the HS team was amazing

[lcadad]

My son was 14, played AAA and for his High School team. I believe the rule is 8th graders can’t play varsity. If you can make both work there is I encourage it. His experience with the HS team was amazing

I'm assuming this was Duck's league, because LAKHSL has no actual High School teams?  Playing for 2 teams can be great, if you have the money and time, and the schedule works out, and the player is up to it.  At this juncture most people I've talked to are of the opinion that the LAKHSL has gotten pretty pricey for what it is. 


At least in the LAKHSL they used to allow middle schoolers on JV teams, but again, JV is not an age group, and the last I heard, which was about 2 seasons back, is that they were not going to allow middle school kids to play in the LAKHSL anymore.  Since they really don't restrict players by school or locale effectively, I wouldn't be shocked if middle schoolers still get rostered, but I still don't think that makes it a good alternative to just playing some level of bantam.