[Kyle]

"guest":3dvjwbuy wrote:

Well well, it’s a long time since I have commented and caused a bit of strife on this good old forum, and it really would be rude of me to not do it again. So here it goes. This entire visor issue is complete crap in my opinion. If the refs in the DIHL are going to enforce this issue on certified visors, then expect players to drop out because of such crap. If you are wanting players to fork out another $100 just to get a “certified” visor because the visor that they currently hav is neither clear or transparent, you better give your head a good hard shake. New Zeland is not an ice hockey power house nor will ever be. There will never be a player from New Zealand going over to North America and making it big, so why the hell are you even considering enforcing rules like we are a pro league? This is isn’t even semi pro here so get over it. Really, if the player has a half visor and it covers the eyes, which it is supposed to do then let them play. If you enforce it, then that is a fantastic way of discouraging people from playing. A fair comment was made that it doesn’t help getting uncertified gear imported, but you know what? what a jerky comment to say. You should be thanking Darren and the wonderful crew that works at SK8 for even giving you an option of buying good quality gear. I personally know for a fact that it is end of season stock from over seas. So if I wear you, I would stop bad mouthing the guys who represent SK8 at the rink, (That’s Stefan King, Ryan Wick and Brent Hodge), they are just selling the gear for the players so they can play. I praise those guys and their boss, Darren, for giving players in Dunedin a chance at purchasing good quality gear. So I say if you enforce that stupid rule about players must wear a certified visor, then expect players to drop out. I know for a fact that if I was playing, that I would ask for my money back from the DIHL and drop out because of a stupid rule like this, especially in a DEVELOPING hockey nation.[/quote:3dvjwbuy]

1. We don’t give refunds for players who sign up, and then when they re-read the rules and decide they don’t like them. Refunds would be for players who sustained an injury preventing them from playing, or had to leave Dunedin on short notice, or similar. They’re considered on a case-by-case basis. We’ve put more details into the helmet laws in this years DIHL, working with Phil Handcock, the DIHA Head Referee, to make it entirely clear what players should have on their heads.

2. If players read the rules, know that they don’t comply, and then enter competitions in any sport, they run the risk that referees are going to give them grief. That’s why we have rules, so referees can enforce them, for safety, quality, and enjoyment of the sport.

3. I bet no referee in any Dunedin competition will ever check a visor to see if it’s HECC certified in this year, or any year in the near future. That doesn’t mean that players shouldn’t be looking for HECC certified visors if they go shopping for one.

4. Referees are in sole charge of any game that takes place out on the ice. So if any referee does enforce particular rules, they’re entirely within their rights. If they choose not to, that’s their choice as well. This happened last year in relation to visors. Referees run the games, the rest of us just live with what they decide. I can understand why players complain when referees don’t call things that are in the rules. Complaining when referees enforce rules which players have all signed up to would feel a little silly to me. If players don’t like the rules they should change them – we have a local rulebook and that can be used to divert the rules from the IIHF standards – it already does this in some ways.

5. People don’t just get injured in pro leagues. In fact, I’d suspect that people are more likely to get injured in amateur leagues, where the skill levels, fitness etc are not as good, and dangerous play is more likely to happen. The puck/swinging stick/boards you got bashed into doesn’t know how serious you take your hockey, but good safety gear will help you either way.

6. If I want to harass Stefan, Hodge and Ryan, I’ll do it at practise, or at the shop, or when Stefan coaches my son, or when we play on the same team in the Easton Cup. I’m not sure if any of them ‘represent’ SK8 at the rink (sounds very hip hop), but I don’t feel like I’m bad-mouthing any of them by pointing out that they sell certified visors and people can buy them there. Seems like useful information that hockey players should know about.

7. There are certified visors at SK8 for $40. There’s better ones for more than that. I’m going to pop down and get mine tomorrow, they’ve had a new helmet sent down for me.

[Kyle]

"rookie#19":96h6ekp0 wrote:

But to my understanding, until now there has not been a rule the visors have to be HECC cert. Could be wrong?? So up until this point, how is it wrong for my boss to be selling HECC non-certified visors?? They are no cheaper for him to get, hes just helping people get gear they cant from new zealand. The rink sell non certified visors also, as I dont think the rules have had a problem with these types of visors until now. Again could be wrong.[/quote:96h6ekp0]

I’m not saying he has been wrong. I’m just saying that the hockey community should be pushing proper safe gear. Obviously a prime place for that to happen is at point of sale. As you point out, given a heap of players have non-certified stuff, it’s going to be hard when they turn up at the rink to tell them to go away. If the association, other players, shops etc all say ‘go HECC, because they’re better’ then this wouldn’t be an issue, because everyone would have the right gear.

"rookie#19":96h6ekp0 wrote:

A visor is a visor, and believe me, pretty much the same damage could be done to someones face whether certified or not, as visors can only move to a certain point upwards on the helmet anyway.[/quote:96h6ekp0]

I think that’s a dangerous statement to make. That _could_ be true. But the point of certification is that it’s guaranteed, by experts who have tested it extensively, to meet sensible safety needs. If it’s not certified, you’d hope it’s just as safe, we don’t know.

[Kyle]

Yeah, though right not it’s heading for the prize of “geekiest conversation that should really not be shown to the public for fear of never having sex again”.

It would be good if more of the committee were on here, even if they ignored everything but the administration forum.

[Kyle]

I maintain a SQL database but I really wouldn’t know SQL if I fell over it, someone else designed it I just keep it ticking over.

Database principles however, one of the actually really useful things I learnt in my computer science degree. Actually had to use it several times in my jobs since, though this is the first time I’ve used it in hockey.

[Kyle]

And now I’m coming around to having two tables, ‘tops’ and ‘teams’. Each team has one (hypothetically two, for home and away, but we don’t do that here) tops. There might be many instances of the team beasts, but they’d all use the same tops table entry.

[Kyle]

"Michael":govyt3o2 wrote:

Ok I see, I think where im getting confused here is that in Dunedin we have “teams” for competitions that always have same name, but really they are not the same team, they just have the same name because thats the name on the tops we have.

In your example, I would see it like this. Create two teams rather than one “Beasts (DIHL ” and “Beasts (SIHL)”, Keep in mind this “program” could help out other rinks around New Zealand that don’t use the same “grouping” method we use in Dunedin because we have tops with those team names.[/quote:govyt3o2]

I guess my concern is (getting into database theory) is that if you create two different teams, you’re recreating information and storing it twice. If you have a table of teams, or maybe even call it ‘tops’ (Beasts, Sharks, SK8 etc etc), and then another table for each instance that team occurs you’re avoiding doing that.

If you think about a database in which the Beasts might appear in SIHL, DIHL (twice), Easton Cup, Erewhon Cup, and then maybe be used by other people (midgets or peewees for their leagues), you might be re-creating that information about the Beasts ‘tops’ six or seven times.

You might be able to help the team management out if you can ‘recreate existing team with new instance’ button, and then modify the roster. Say for the beasts, where the DIHL teams and SIHL teams are similar but not exactly the same, it’d be good to have a button to make a new Beasts instance, copy all the existing info across, and then modify it to make the differences. It’d also be useful to recreate last years beasts team to make this years instance of the beasts team as well, rather then re-entering the info.

[Kyle]

Ah cool.

Except the bit where they under-counted the number of rinks in NZ by about half a dozen. What did they say, three? Two in Auckland, Chch, Queenstown, Gore, Dunedin, Naseby, Alex, Tekapo (is that finished yet) etc etc.

And the figure of three million for covering a rink with ice, which they must have got from the importer. What tosh. It’s three million if you include the boards, boxes, benches, netting etc etc maybe, and then throw a million dollars into the rubbish. Those still apply to synthetic stuff.

[Kyle]

"Ryan":f0tpolyl wrote:

Nothing has changed. They just need to register as per normal and I can give them access if they pass on their username to me. It’s done via the control panel of the forum. I’d rather do that myself than have you do it just so I know exactly who does and doesn’t have access to what.[/quote:f0tpolyl]

I’m not sure who’s on here, but it’d be good if Phil Handcock, Phil PJ (is he signed up to the forum?), Jack, Mark Hareb, Michael Mitchell, maybe Graham Phipps-Black, Aaron Bryant were added if they’re not in already.

When I started this topic I meant DIHL 2007, but I typoed and only just noticed it, and now I see why you started talking about stuff which isn’t possible with current numbers! Duh me.

[Kyle]

Dammit. Post links people!

[Kyle]

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

With finances I was not sure if there would be a need for it to be linked back to a tournament or game as some finance items may not be related to one, this is why each one has a “Description”. But I see how it will be helpful, I will add a link to tournaments.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

I can’t think of another area of finances that the club collects that you’d want to track in this system. Possibly registrations, but the registration amount is fixed, so I’d just have a tick box. I can’t think of a reason we’d want to track registrations in previous years, I’d say that it should be a tick box which gets blanked by a button by the admin at the beginning of the year.

The other money we collect relates to practises and outside tournaments, and I can’t think there’d be anything useful in putting it in this system.

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

A player can be in any number of teams. Players are placed into teams before the tournament by organizers or by choice (However things are run for that tournament), so there is no limit as to how many times a player is entered.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

My point is, there’s things that don’t change about teams – name, top color etc. There are other things about teams that do change – the players in them, manager, coach etc.

Take the Beasts for example. The DIHL beasts are going to have a slightly different team lineup than the SIHL Beasts. I would have done it by a ‘team’ table which indicated all the different teams that we can have. And then made a team_instance table, which links to the team table. Players, coaches etc, link to team_instance_id. So if you’re playing in both Beasts teams, you’d be in both instances. Ryan, who is playing Bears in the DIHL, only links to one.

If you put it in one table with multiple beasts instances then you’re both recreating data, and also you’d have no way to list all players who played for the Beasts this year, as they’d be in Beasts 1 and Beasts 2.

Also, it’d be really nice if we could link the cell phone numbers to a web sms sending service. Clicking a button and sending everyone a txt message would be brilliant. There used to be a free one of these in south africa but it closed down, but I’m sure they still exist.

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

I had a discussion with Ryan about the competition thing, the reason why I have the option to add teams directly to a competition is because not all competitions will have more than one devision, in the case that a competition only had one devision the organizer entering the competition would be required to specify a devision for a tournament with no divisions?

Instead it has the option to have a devision less competition or one with devisions.

If a competition has more than one devision it will ignore the “completions_teams” table completely and look in “divisions_teams” hence the double up there.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

OK, if that’s going to work <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smiley.gif" alt="” title=”Smiley” />

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

• period1_start
• period2_start
• period3_start

These are for another underlining possiblilty of the program, To speed things along for the scorers I’m looking at making a scoring program that will work with the database to make there lives easier. The period starts would allow a detailed time line of how the game went for players to view after the game.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

Interested to see how it works, but remember that people need to run this and watch a game of hockey at the same time, so you might want to make it a removable feature.

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

I see what you mean, but people would not have to enter it manually, I was thinking here it would just be added by the type of penalty any way. So I suppose there isn’t a need for time but instead a new table for penalties and there times.[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

Yeah my point is that it doesn’t need to be stored.

"Michael":ugvaqfyg wrote:

Also the time thing is another fancy thing that would be included in the scoring system, when they clicked for a shot at the net it would record the time as well with no extra effort for a detailed time line of the game <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/cheesy.gif" alt="” title=”Cheesy” />[/quote:ugvaqfyg]

Again, I’m not sure our scorers would want to do that, so you might want to make it an optional feature.

We could also put in the feature where they list who was on the ice when goals were scored, and figure out plus/minus for players, but there’s no way they’re going to cope with that. They’re often on their own in the box there, running scoring, timekeeping, and penalty timekeeping.

They sometimes use a computer in there to connect to the scoreboard. It’d be nice if you could interface your system with the software that runs that, but that might be a pipe dream.

[Kyle]

Yeah, I’m not saying that me, or any other referee, is going to kick people off the ice for wearing a non-certified visor. I’d kick someone off however if they weren’t wearing a visor at all, which _is_ a problem that we have here in Dunedin. People should be buying the stuff that meets the rules though, which is through education at the rink and good advice at shops.

I think the other thing is, and this isn’t you Stefan but your boss, is that hockey shops should be working to sell people gear which meets the rules. If people are playing at the level where the visor is important for performance over the grill, then they should be buying the stuff that’s certified. Having looked at the HECC website and found out how they certify, you can see why the ones that everyone is wearing aren’t as good – they only have two points of contact and they’re at the ends. The middle of the visor, which is the likely place to get hit, isn’t supported at all. Shops actively promote the stuff which doesn’t meet the rules, and some of these rules are there for a good reason. Does your boss tell you to encourage people to buy HECC certified gear? If he doesn’t… why not?

And you guys are selling HECC certified visors there for $40. They’re just not contact certified. That’s what I’m going for, and if for some reason I play contact, I’ll just go back to my grill.

[Kyle]

OK, this is going to start getting seriously geeky soon. Or it already was when Michael posted that table structure I guess.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “players_positions”
• player_id
• team_id
• position[/quote:1to34qya]

Just for this one, lots of people tick multiple boxes, or leave themselves open for forward or defense. So either include forward/defense as an option, or allow multiple options to be entered.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Tables “players_finances”
• player_id
• type (topay, payed)
• description
• amount
• time

Table “players_hired_gear”
• player_id
• item[/quote:1to34qya]

For these ones here, I’d suggest you need to link them to a ‘entry’ or what might be referred to as a ‘player_instance’. By my reading of what you’re doing, a player is a constant feature. Michael has name, experience, links to address and phone details etc. By your tables above, we can track what Michael has paid and what he’s hired. However if Michael enters in multiple tournaments over time, we can’t track which tournaments he’s paid for. So I’d suggest each player has a one to many relationships with ‘entry’ or similar. Then you use an entry table to indicate which tournament they’re entering in, and which team they’re playing in in that tournament. I’d want to know what Michael has paid for this tournament, not what he’s paid over the history of his hockey.

Also note that it’s possible to enter one tournament more than once, if there are multiple grades or age groups. Some people play in both the A and B grade DIHL for example. So that would need to be possible.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “players_addresses”
• player_id
• street
• suburb
• city
• country
• post_code
• description

Table “players_phonenumbers”
• player_id
• type
• description
• area_code
• number[/quote:1to34qya]

We sometimes get players with multiple email addresses, so it’d be useful to have a way to break them out into a separate table and have them. It’d be good to have the secondary email address as only ever useful manually – like we’d never want to automatically send an email to that address, but if we got a bounce we’d move it into the primary address.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “players_teams”
• player_id
• team_id
• number

Table “teams”
• team_id (Auto increment)
• name
• description
• color
• alternate_color
• manager
• coach
• assistant_coach[/quote:1to34qya]

Again, teams might be used as multiple instances, and multiple times. So team should just include name, top, and color (bloody American spelling!). Anything that might change – manager, coach etc, should be in a team_instance table (which would surely link through to your competitions stuff below?).

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “competitions”
• competition_id (Auto increment)
• name
• description
• start_time[/quote:1to34qya]

I’m not sure if we’d do start time. I’d put ‘year’ in as a field, because that might be useful. In that instance a competition should be able to have two years, because a summer league would cross over.

If you wanted to think about this being useful for more than Dunedin, then you’d need to think about multiple venues.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “competitions_teams”
• competition _id
• team_id[/quote:1to34qya]

Teams don’t enter in competitions, they enter in grades or divisions. We don’t enter the Beasts in the DIHL, we enter them in the DIHL B grade. I would suspect the easiest way to do it would be that if a competition is open, it just has one division called ‘open’ which then gets ignored in all the output. I’m not sure you need this table.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “devisions_teams”
• devision_id
• team_id[/quote:1to34qya]

I don’t understand why you need this one either. It’s just a linkage, why not have a one-to-many relationship between the table before and teams? I’m no SQL expert though, so maybe you just need to. And, that’s not how you spell division.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “games”
• game_id (Auto)
• competition_id
• devision_id
• description
• team1_id
• team2_id
• scheduled_start
• period1_start
• period2_start
• period3_start[/quote:1to34qya]

I’m not sure if we record the last three bits of data. We would need to have scorekeeper, referee, linesmen, timekeeper.

As a note on those last ones. I’m not sure if you’d want to add them to the players table, or make some other table of ‘officials’. Just to prevent having to type their names in, you should be able to look up people like Jackie, Joyce, and all the referees.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “goals”
• goal_id
• game_id
• player_id
• team_id
• time

Table “goals_assisted”
• goal_id
• player_id[/quote:1to34qya]

Why wouldn’t you just put two more player_id fields in the goal table for assists, and save yourself a table? They could be left blank if it’s unassisted.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “penalties”
• penalty_id
• game_id
• player_id
• team_id
• type
• description
• minutes
• time[/quote:1to34qya]

If you have ‘type’ you shouldn’t need to enter minutes. It should look it up from a table, I can’t think that we’d want people manually entering how long penalties are. Minor, double minor, major, game etc are all fixed.

If you have ‘player_instance’ as I outlined above, you don’t need team_id in all these, as player_instance knows what team they’re in.

"Michael":1to34qya wrote:

Table “shots”
• shot_id
• game_id
• player_id
• team_id
• time[/quote:1to34qya]

For goals, penalties, assists, shots, you also need to record the period of the game that they fell in.

For shots, I don’t know of any league that records the time of shots – maybe the NHL does it. We would only ever count the shots in a period against a goalie. Which you’d compare with the goals in a period that goalie let in. So I’d remove this table and move the shots information into the game table, split by period.

Looking good,
Kyle

[Kyle]

"Chris":3nf9zn85 wrote:

Wow, this database idea is actually giving me hot flushes….[/quote:3nf9zn85]

OK. I’m not getting changed near to you next week. Too weird.

[Kyle]

Oh no, definitely go with the first one. Captures the true Chris.

[Kyle]

Oooh.

Look who’s all “I’m refereeing friendship. I’ll ask Peter tomorrow.”

Name dropping, terrible thing. Knew him when he was just a snotty little Kings boy too.

[Author]

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