Ice Schedules

In an effort to help answer some questions the board is receiving regarding this year's ice schedule, I thought I'd send out a quick note with some background information pertaining to ice touches and ice hours. The association purchased almost exactly the same amount of ice as we did last year to support our 13 travel teams as well as our Mite program (same quantity of teams as last year). We budget, by level, the amount of times we want our players to be on the ice for practices and games. This is commonly referred to as 'ice touches'.

In the past, we have almost always scheduled our practices and games to be in 60 minute blocks (with the exception of Bantams/U14's who have 90 minute games). Based on some membership feedback asking us if there was anyway we could reduce the number of times a family had to go to the rink (going to the rink 60-100+ times during a 4 month season is an awful lot for traveling teams), we introduced this year more frequent 75 and 90 minute practices, which is commonly referred to as 'ice hours'. By doing this, the number of ice touches will go down, but the total amount of ice hours will stay the same. Let me give you an example:

At the U12/PeeWee level, we budgeted them to be on the ice between 4-5 times per week. Across a 20 week season, this would equate to 80-100 times a family would visit a rink and the quantity of ice time would be 4,800-6,000 minutes. If you assume that, on average, this level's ice times are 75 minutes then the number of ice touches would be 64 instead of 80 if you took the 4,800 minutes and divided by 75 minutes. 16 less trips to the rink yet still the same amount of time on the ice.

The message I'm trying to convey is that ice touches may be lower than last year, however, the amount of time on the ice should be the same. Again, we are trying this out this year in an effort to minimize trips to the rinks for all of us. In the end, if this is something the players/families/coaches would rather not do in the future, we can always adjust for next year.

Thanks for your support of MWHA and if you have any further questions about ice scheduling, please contact Todd at mwhaice@gmail.com or 952.221.6464

Todd Courneya, MWHA Ice Scheduler