Hello RoughRiders Families,

This year of travel hockey is upon us, and your coaching staff couldn’t be more excited about the amazing year this is going to be. We are back at ImOn Ice Arena and will have consistent ice and our hockey community will be together again. This year’s registration and tryout numbers presented a unique opportunity for our club to create a more consistent model for roster development, the use of blended rosters, improved tournament selection, and better level of play consistency. Our experience of experimenting with different scheduling models over the past several years has allowed us to put together what I think will be our best process to date.  

I want to emphasize as a hockey director that our staff and I are always trying to learn better ways to do the job that we need to do. For example, in our spring AAA program we used a more blended coaching staff, (groups of coaches assisting with more than one team). Also, last year, we used double rostered players for the first time. Several of these tools, we learned, had advantages and disadvantages.  As we said at the 2018 Annual Membership meeting, “we are going to try different things to get better, we are going to make mistakes, but our goal is to not repeat the same mistakes, but to learn, to grow, and to be better every year.”

By seeing what worked and what didn’t work we gained insight. With that insight, looking forward to the 2021-2022 season, we are even better equipped with knowledge that will bring  innovation to our development process. Also in innovating how we manage both team and individual placement we will be able to maximize the amount of resources we can dedicate to the development of every player in our program making it more structured to their individual needs.

For example, we understood the frustrations from parents of the use of double rostered players, and the inconsistencies of game counts between players. As we work diligently to brainstorm solutions I am pleased to say we have made a model that all but eliminates those disparities. We believe it will create a fair and equitable development model and more consistently equalized game counts. This has brought forth the creation of what we have dubbed the “RRHC Roster Algorithm”.  

We believe that this improved outlook on team development will have a tremendous impact on the whole club and most importantly, at the individual player level. As we use the system to focus on improving every individual player in their specific age level, and as we create an inclusive and balanced development philosophy, it will elevate the skills of all our players based on their individual needs. More importantly, it will create more opportunities for our players to be leaders and make a difference in their teams and their communities.

Most of this process is almost complete but there are still some things that we are trying to finalize:

• Specific rosters and their corresponding tournament date and location. We are very close to having this finalized. 
• Specific rosters and their corresponding friendly game schedule. This will be a work in progress as we go through the season as there are still clubs who haven’t had their tryouts. 

Parent Team Meetings Dates and Times:

All meetings will take place at ImOn Ice Arena. 

10U Parent Meeting: Tuesday, September 14 @ 6:00pm
12U Parent Meeting: Tuesday, September 14 @ 7:00pm
14U Parent Meeting, Thursday, September 16 @ 6:00pm
HS Parent Meeting, Thursday, September 16 @ 7:00pm

The following rosters will be used for tournaments and games. Some key points of the RRHC Roster Algorithm:

• Takes into account an awkward number of players (not enough for 2 teams but too many for 1 team, etc…) while accomplishing desired team sizes. 
• Takes into account the ability of the players of the individual roster and to place them in appropriate competition. 
• Takes into account the number of practices and games we want to achieve for each age group. 
• Each roster has a corresponding name: White, Theo, Teddy, Silver, Abdelkader, Martinez, Grey, etc…

WE WILL COVER THE RRHC ROSTER ALGORITHM AT THE TEAM MEETINGS and will answer any and all questions then. 

What do you tell your players?

They had a very good tryout and they will be playing hockey for RRHC this coming season and congratulations! Their coaching staff can’t wait to get started this upcoming season!