Reply To: Diary of a Season 2014-15

[Tom Molloy]

I am in Ardrossan a town close to Edmonton playing in the +55 Canadian Championships. We qualified by finishing second in the Alberta games two seasons ago. We split the two games yesterday and have two more today. Final is tomorrow.

I have to go back to the Bantam evaluations right after our game where the top 40 of the 115 trying out are playing and then we have a draft to select the one AAA and three AA teams. Finally we will have a team that starts practice next week. I was evaluation for 30 hours between Sat. and Wed. and the first years played two games a night the week before. So a long time in the rink.

If we make the final I will do the 3.5 hour drive back here for 10:45. It is just lucky I am rich and can afford all of the gas. (We got in the final by beating Ontario 4-2 and won the championship game 5-2.)
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Monday morning.

We had the draft and each team has 26 players. The AAA team has 31 and must drop down to 19. The three AA teams will draft the 12 players that got cut and add 4 to their roster, so we will have 30 and have to get down to 19.

We are getting nasty emails from parents of boy's who didn't make the try-out roster. A lot of good players have already been cut and all of the players that are left are pretty good. I don't think there is anyone that you would say is a terrible player. Just some are better than others, or work harder, etc.. Even if they all are great we can only keep 19 per team and we are all doing our best to pick the ones who deserve to make it.

The ones who don't make it can go back to the community association hockey which is very good in the first few divisions.

Last year 12 000 players participated in Calgary Minor Hockey Week. So there are a lot of good players around. I am coaching what is called Quadrant hockey. The city of 1.2 million people is divided into 4 quadrants so our pool is about 400 000 people with about 15 arenas. About five large hockey associations with 25-50 teams from U6 to U20 each feed into our organization which has Bantam U15, Midget U18 and Jr. B U20 teams. Most of the kid's aspire to play quadrant hockey and it starts at Bantam U15.

Everywhere organizes their programs differently and this is how we do it in Calgary.

'The Game is the Greatest Coach'
'Enjoy the Game'