[Kyle]

"Ryan":13xug0up wrote:

I just noticed that I was advertising a social game on Saturdays at 7:30pm on the home page. Does anyone know if this is still on? I thought it was cancelled long ago, but wasn’t sure if I just imagined that or something.

I’ve removed it now, but just want to double confirm I haven’t made a mistake there.

Ryan,

[/quote:13xug0up]

That hasn’t been on Sunday for… months.

[Kyle]

What’s that Tim? You let in two own goals? Man… better sort that out.

[Kyle]

You don’t need permission to do chalking. I have done it many times.

[Kyle]

"Azzy77":2b4zoufu wrote:

Here’s the issue, if I say to my mate, hey you want to come along play Hockey, he will say sure can I be in your team? I say no cos you have never played before, you play b-grade by yourself, he’s not going to come along.
(This has actually happened to me on more than one occasion)
[/quote:2b4zoufu]

This is the trade off that we made when we split the grades. It’s a major downside, there are obviously advantages however. One of the things we were aware of when we made the split was that the prems weren’t getting to play any hockey last year, and this would give them games without dragging it down to the beginner level. I suspect, if there’s a national league team next year, that the split might require further thought/adjustment/removal, depending on how those players are managed.

I was vaguely tempted with the idea of runing one split dihl a year, and one open dihl – probably the open dihl at the end of the year, when the season is winding down and people are feeling more social. I never decided if that was the way to go, or 2x split dihls however.

I think it’d be good if early next year, ‘The DIHL’ (whoever that is) was to sit down with people like Steve Jackson, Mike Sam, Bode, whoever is the President next year and think about its strategic purpose. There’s a social angle, there’s a development of the club in size angle, there’s the money to pay for coaching angle (something it’s going to come well short in this year), there’s the development of players at different levels.

If there was a way to get feedback from the players as well, that would no doubt help too.

[Kyle]

I think more players is at the heart of what a lot of people are trying to do at Dunedin Ice Hockey.

We used to have three prem teams competing in the southern region. Bigger is always a goal, but there’s no magic button. To lay it all at how Kurt and Cy ran the DIHL is a simplistic answer to a big problem.

That being said, the DIHL we ran at the end of last year (10 teams) is the largest DIHL there’s ever been. But it was large for precisely the opposite reasons that you’ve both put forward. A split grade, rather than an open grade, encouraged players at both ends of the ability scale to compete. It was open to kids, and they made up a large portion of the B grade.

Why doesn’t someone open up the social room after some Wednesday night games. See if people want to come along and have a drink? The way to build up culture is to start it off.

[Kyle]

"Michael":1i84vs9l wrote:

The stats app is designed to have the information entered afterwards. there is no need for anyone to sit there with a laptop unless they want to be able to supply live stats.
[/quote:1i84vs9l]

You’ll have to be careful with things like delayed penalties which don’t get put up because a goal is scored. We had one of them at nationals, where penalty 1 was put back up on the clock even though a goal was scored, because the ref had a second delayed penalty at the time.

And penalties that are recorded but not put on the clock for the same reason.

And ‘imperfect clockmanship’. If times are off by a tiny bit on the scoresheet, then the computer might start doing things like calling it a powerplay goal, when in actual fact it wasn’t, and wasn’t recorded as such on the scoresheet.

Why wouldn’t you want to enter the stats live? Why write it all down on paper and then copy it into the computer, when you can skip the intermediary step and do it in one?

[Kyle]

"Ryan":12zmxo4o wrote:

You guys are selling me on the size issue a bit. Albeit some of the peewees are quite a bit smaller than both Bode and Kara.
[/quote:12zmxo4o]

And some aren’t. My son isn’t yet at the level where he could play in the DIHL, but he’ll be bigger than both of them by the time he is!

"Ryan":12zmxo4o wrote:

Perhaps a better approach would be to market the league more heavily to the older players. This was done quite effectively by Cy and Kurt by really pounding away at recruiting new adult players. They also organised a lot of social events which have never happened with the new version of the league, albeit Cy actually organised (and still does I think) social events for a living so was unsurprisingly quite good at it.
[/quote:12zmxo4o]

I’m not sure if this is just a DIHL thing, I think it’s a DIHA thing just as much. There was a bunch of beginners from a hall of residence earlier this year, who were close to entering the DIHL, and then they didn’t, and they disappeared from beginners.

I wonder if a student ice hockey club would help, and we need visibility on campus. Take clubs and socs day. It’s great that Deanna does that, but there should be an ice hockey player there the whole time. There could be a varsity A, and a varsity B team in the DIHL. Students (and staff too) are pretty good at socialising!

What we also don’t do, is bring ice hockey out of the rink. We should be thinking about ways to promote the sport to the wider community. How can we use our roller-blades here? What about the winter festival? The DIHL advertising was always pretty minimal when I was in charge of it, but I never really saw it as a way to bring in absolute beginners – I’ve always viewed the DIHL as picking up people who at the very least, have been to beginners a few times. It’s the role of the club as a whole to bring in those people to the beginners sessions.

[Kyle]

How’s that physically going to work? Like will there be a button to push when a goal is scored? And another to start and stop the clock?

What happens if you’re busy entering the penalties and then a goal is scored?

What about games at a higher level where there are 2 or 3 scorers? How do they all work around one computer?

Scoresheets have been used for lots of years, and while they’re not perfect, they’re the way they are because one person can control them and watch the game. Just be careful that you’re not making it more difficult for the scorer.

[Kyle]

This isn’t something that is currently recorded by our statistics. I guess if you wanted to onsell it, it might be useful to have in, but I wouldn’t say it’s essential.

What’s proving so hard about it? In the record of the goal wouldn’t you just have yes/no records for power play and shorthanded entries. And then in the ‘entering a goal’ interface, you could choose even-handed (default)/powerplay/shorthanded?

[Kyle]

"Chris":3il7qay7 wrote:

I was called for tripping. Granted, i had my stick over the top of the kid’s, but that’s because he was physically too short for me to get my stick under!!!!!!!!
[/quote:3il7qay7]

The referees response to this (without having seen it) is: “you are responsible for the location of your stick”. If your stick is in amongst a players legs, then unless the puck is in there, when they fall over, it’s tripping. Players are entitled to free movement unrestricted by their opposition.

"Chris":3il7qay7 wrote:

Are they cheap shot artists?
Yes, far far more so than I think most adults realise. As yet another (again not me) member of my team said the other night, the refs don’t even see it because it’s just not something that you expect to see, or is especially visible given their smaller size.
[/quote:3il7qay7]

That’s probably a fair comment – little kids are more likely to get away with stuff. But that’s a refereeing issue, not an issue with the players.

"Chris":3il7qay7 wrote:

In response to Kyle, two people who I have tried to bully into playing hockey have cited the youngsters playing as being one, among other, factors in why they didn’t want to play, having had bad experiences with kids in other sports in the past.
[/quote:3il7qay7]

I couldn’t see a viable league if you took out all the midgets and peewees. You’d lose three high school teams. You’d lose half the bears. You’d maybe end up with three teams. I know that ‘adult’ ice hockey used to be a lot bigger at the Big Chill, and there were about ten DIHL teams made of adults. Even if all the adult A and B graders signed up, we couldn’t have anywhere near that many teams now. We don’t have the students playing, people aren’t taking up ice hockey much socially as young adults.

[Kyle]

You’re not coming out to Long Beach on Saturday?

I’m entirely unsure how ‘$7 for nibbles’ gets transformed into ‘banquet’, yet you’re about the third person I’ve heard call it that.

[Kyle]

"Ryan":23odus21 wrote:

Although I think it would help recruit more players if there weren’t ankle biters everywhere and I think teams would be more social with each other if they could go for a drink after a game. When I played in the league back when there weren’t any kids allowed, it was normal to socialise with your teammates and the other teams after games or other times. But it’s mainly a size issue.
[/quote:23odus21]

I’m not aware of anyone who doesn’t play in the B grade DIHL because there’s kids in it. There might be, but I’ve never had anyone tell me that, even in hearsay, and I’ve hit a fair number of people up to play in the DIHL over the past couple of years.

There are however a number of people who play in the DIHL largely because there are kids in it – often their kids. In November the peewees will be playing a game against their parents – each peewee has to have a parent on the ice. Some of the parents play, but some will be playing their first game of hockey. It’s a growth area for the sport.

Even if there are a couple of people who aren’t playing because of the kids, I can’t imagine we’re missing out on players overall, at worst it ends up balancing out.

"Ryan":23odus21 wrote:

My main concern is with the players who have been given dispensations to play despite being under the age limit, some are only 11 (I think). Thirteen is doable as most of them are getting a bit bigger then (some bigger than me by then). But the 11-12 year olds are just too small IMO. Too easy to get a knee to the head or have someone four times their body mass land on top of them.
[/quote:23odus21]

I can’t recall this ever happening – at least because of size. Most of the younger kids playing in the DIHL are pretty tough. Nick Patchett is probably the smallest, and he’ll bounce up from almost anything. They face rougher play in the peewee house league games than they do in the DIHL. And a bunch of them will be midgets next year, which will be much more physical than the DIHL.

The B grade DIHL has always had great differences in size, and players seem to be fine working around that. It should always, I think, be kept as a friendly, open grade, trying to accept as many people as possible. The young kids are obviously going to be small, but they’re not the only ones. Kara is tiny for example. If there’s a problem with physical size, then shouldn’t there be a tape measure before you step on the ice? Or scales? Why discriminate on age if size is the problem?

I never put the age limit in for size reasons, Ryan might have a different story. For me it was always about skill level, both physical skill, but also basic understanding of the game. It’s difficult to get some younger kids to understand basic things like offside, and that can spoil the game for their team mates if they get blown up every time you go into the zone.

Once there’s an age limit, then you can break it for exceptions. All the kids playing now had the coach consulted when they first signed up to make sure they could handle it. They all understand the game well, can skate well, and play reasonably good hockey. There’s a couple more peewees who don’t play in the DIHL, but they wouldn’t be out of place there. There’s some others who should wait another year or two before playing in the DIHL, it’s just not where they’re at.

And if people are having trouble modifying play because players are shorter than them, they should try wearing my skates for a while!

[Kyle]

It always surprises me that people get paid millions of dollars to do that.

I mean, not only do they spend half the game fighting, but they really suck at it.

[Kyle]

"Michael":36oe8ia4 wrote:

I spent 16hrs on it last night
[/quote:36oe8ia4]

You’re whacked. There ain’t 16 hours in no night.

Ryan is probably more the person to come up with templates these days. My design skills are pretty rusty, to say the least. I’d just be tempted to build something incredibly basic, the ‘look and feel’ we can play with later. Go for white page with a heading and jam the data in.

I can rant a lot about what it should/shouldn’t etc be able to do, if it’s specifications/rules you’re wanting…

[Kyle]

"Ryan":1ywfppuj wrote:

"Chris":1ywfppuj wrote:

Happy birthday
Three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven cheers for Ryan![/quote:1ywfppuj]

Pi

….

it took me a while to get that

….

Ryan,

[/quote:1ywfppuj]

You’re off the [geek] team. You’ll have to go hang out with the jocks. Sorry.

[Author]

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