Oct 16, 2013 | Ken Jamieson | 3045 views
Midget House League Game Times
There seems to be some confusion about Midget House League and what the length of their games should be. All GMHA HL programs get 2 hours of ice each week as per the GMHA Ice Allocation Policy. All divisions use 1 hour for games and 1 hour for practices except the Midgets who have been allowed to use both hours for games. That is what the GMHA Registration costs and GMHA Budgets are based on.
By OMHA regulations in a 1 hour time slot only a three ten (10-10-10) minute game may be played. Last season and at the start of this year it has been pushed by several of the Midget HL Coaches to try and squeeze 10-10-15 minute games into these 1 hour timeslots to increase the amount of ice time. While sometimes it works out and the games get completed, that isn't always the case. So the 2 teams that playing in the last game the Town Staff have the unenviable job of having to stop the game because there is another paying customer who has a contract with the Town for the next ice time which is unfair to both those teams effected that they don't get to complete their game while other teams got to not only complete their game but an extra 1/2 of a period. Not to mention the parents and Coaches that take it out on the Town Staff that leads to calls to the GMHA Board from the Town stating rightly so that our members should not be verbally abusing the Town Staff for doing their jobs and further incidence could jeopardize our programming and ice allotment.
The second issue with this is that every time a game is curfewed in the OMHA the President of the association has to write a written report to our OMHA Regional Executive Member stating why the curfew happened and what we are doing to prevent further games from being curfewed and trying to jam a 10-10-15 minute game into a 60 minute timeslot which is already against another OMHA Policy would not be an acceptable excuse!
Thirdly is the cost. Even if the games do get squeezed into the one hour their is a different pay rate for the 3 OMHA Officials and two Timekeepers to run a 10-10-15 versus a 10-10-10 game. Which doesn't seem like a whole lot per game but when you multiply it out by the over 100+ Midget HL games that will get played in the GMHA over the season it doesn't take long to add up into a $1000 plus in additional costs.
The GMHA is very much trying to control all of your costs so it can possibly lead to some sort of reduction in registration fees for next season for all of the members and also in order to try and attract some players back and increase GMHA registration numbers. Our registration has been down (as with almost every other hockey Association in Canada) but we are going to try and achieve this reduction even though the hourly ice costs will go up every January 1st as they have for the past 3 season already or at the very most not have anymore increases.
So I hope this has answered the questions regarding the Midget ice time and that it is supposed to have always been 10-10-10 and the "word" gets around as typically no matter what we post and communicate we still get asked questions that have already been answered taking your volunteers time away from other things to help your association. So we would really appreciate those that do take the time to read this will let everyone else know, thanks and have a safe season!