Mound Westonka Hockey

The Mound-Westonka Hockey Association seeks to provide a community and volunteer-driven program to promote the growth and development of our players. Our Association works to promote a fun, fair, and safe environment that maximizes participation and improves players' skills while developing sportsmanship, teamwork, and self-confidence.

New Board Members:

Tim Niccum, Tim Schwob, Steve Baklund, Mark Studebaker

MWHA coaches will be running dryland training at the Pond Arena starting Wednesday, April 25 from 7:00-9pm. This is a FREE service provided by MWHA and volunteer coaches.

* Who: MWHA kids Mites-High School (girls and boys) Goalies welcome too!
* Dates: April 25, 29, May 2, 6, 9, 13, 16, 20, 23.
* Times: 7:00-7:45 pm Mites
              7:30-8:30 pm Squirts/PeeWee
              8:00-9:00 pm Bantam/HS
* Where: Pond Arena
* Equipment needed by players: Shorts, T-Shirt, Athletic Shoes, Gloves, Stick, Helmet

Our goal is to create a fun and competitive environment for the kids to improve their hockey skills.
* Shooting
* Skating stride on slide boards
* Stickhandling
* Passing
* Play competitive street hockey games
* Quickness and Agility

We are seeking donations of dryland hockey equipment to help fund this program. Items being sought include stick-handling balls, stick weights, heavy ball bearings, etc…

We look forward to seeing the kids at the Pond!

A big thank you to a group of MWHA parents for spearheading a fundraising effort for Jack Jablonski.

Now you can buy Jack's number 13 hockey tape and 100% of the proceeds will go to the Jack Jablonski fund. 

Order online today:

A big thank you to all of our 2011-12 team sponsors!  Please take some time to vist our sponsors page to see who is sponsoring and what kind of business it is.  Should the need arise, please consider using one of the MWHA sponsors.

Thank you!

Becoming better at anything is a marathon, not a sprint. Anyone who's been around youth sports long enough knows that innate ability and the manifestation of true potential usually begin to be revealed in a child's mid to late teens; not at age eight or nine.  One of the big benefits of community-based hockey is that the A-B-C team system provides a place to play hockey for kids of different abilities at different stages of development. Too many people get hung up on the label rather than embracing the benefit of the different levels of play.

Minnesota is the last bastion of community-based hockey in the U.S.  Minnesota also had the most Division I hockey players in 2010, 182. Next in line was Michigan at 131, a state that has a club hockey system. While one cannot necessarily infer that Minnesota has more D-I players because the community-based system allows more late bloomers to reach their potential, one cannot rule it out either. The club hockey system tends to weed kids out at earlier and earlier ages, thereby eliminating the opportunity for potential realization in a good number of kids.

So what does this mean to you? How do you know where your child is at in potential realization? The fact is you'll never really know until you're there, so just enjoy where your child is at that moment in time. If you have an early bloomer superstar, enjoy it, it can be fun. But be ready for other players to catch up in the coming years. If your child is pretty average in the early years, embrace it and support his/her love of the game, for it is passion for the game that will be the catalyst of the late bloomer.

The article below offers a similar but different perspective on the hockey development discussion. Learn how to better support your youth athlete and have fun along the way. Playing hockey with friends doesn't stop at youth hockey -- anywhere there's ice, adult leagues and pickup games endure with players of all stripes and ages.

USA Hockey has enacted a rule change that eliminates body checking at the PeeWee level of boys hockey.  For all of the background on the subject go to the link below.