2007/08 continued a pattern of success for our House League. In 2007/08 House League again expanded by 9 teams from 223 to 232, similar to our 2006/07 growth (Again adding teams to our Timbit program bringing it to 28, and icing 22 Tyke and Novice teams as well).

We continue to enjoy strong support across all of our age groups. We increased our record team count for Midget / Juvenile from 42 teams in 05/06 to 45 in 06/07 and ended up with 48 in 2007/08.

For 2008/09 registration is again strong overall with over 2,500 processed by May 17 and an early waiting list of around 50 five year olds.

The following chart shows how our House League program has grown over the last eight years from 1999/2000 to the end of 2007/08 and we would expect continued expansion into 2008/09.

House League Team History

Volunteers

While I make this statement each year it continues to hold true and is the keystone of our program. Providing our House League program requires commitment and support from a great many volunteers. Heading up the list deserving thanks are the league convenors and senior convenors who spend countless hours at and away from the rink to enable your son or daughter to play.

Over the years we have continued to grow and expand and have consistently ended up adding divisions as our age groups split. Each of those “new” divisions requires an on-site convenor in order to play games.

We are fortunate that we have been able to find volunteers willing to take on this task for all divisions.

Division Convenors

**Congratulations are extended to Debbie Sabatino on being selected as the MOHA “Volunteer of the Year” in recognition of her contributions as a Senior Convenor, HL Committee, Frank Sabatino Memorial Tournament, Awards Week/ Food Drive . . . .

In addition to these volunteers, our list of “Team Officials” – Coaches, Trainers, Managers and Team MOMs extends to approximately 1,000+ additional supporters. All of these people should be commended for their contributions and I hope that they step forward again next season.

We also recognize and appreciate the support of our local sponsors as most of our teams were sponsored this season. Special thanks to Tim Hortons for their ongoing support of our Timbit IP program. Contributions from our sponsors is a major offset to our costs and is appreciated.

We were also supported this year by multiple sponsorships from a number of organizations – key for these being both the Chrysler “Caravan Kids” and “Pizza Pizza”.

The efforts of all of these people were once again rewarded on the ice. During the season, most of our divisions were well balanced with good groupings and challenging match-ups. Play-offs and Awards Week provided many thrilling games and upsets.

Special thanks to Adele Arsenault, Marcie Kinsman, Sharon Quigley, and Michele Evelyn as the key volunteers in making Awards Week such a success.

Our House League teams continued to enjoy enviable tournament records and are recognized as serious contenders wherever they participate. Oakville teams are usually around for the championship games and often face local division rivals in the finals. This success continues to create challenges for us in that a number of associations are reluctant or refuse to admit our teams. In most of our “Red” divisions, our teams are now looking to “Select” or even “Rep” level tournaments.

Report on 2007 / 08 Initiatives

1.      With 232 teams and over 3,600 participants we had over 2,600 games this season – not counting the Timbits “game” activity. That is a huge undertaking and again it went very well. Thankfully, similar to 2006/07 I don’t believe we had any serious injuries and it was a relatively “quiet” year on the discipline front.

2.      This marked the second year of the “three tier” system for many divisions. After some growing pains in year one, it seems that this structure is now accepted and understood by most individuals and is achieving the goal of providing better development opportunities and closer competition for most individuals and teams.

3.      For the fourth consecutive year we ran our Juvenile Red as a “no body checking” division. Since we were not able to get enough players wishing to play full contact, or “comfortable” playing safely at that level, we balanced two eight team leagues, one Red and one White with no body checking. On the whole it went well again this season and will likely be the same approach we follow for this age group in 2008/09.

4.      The seventh annual Frank Sabatino Memorial Tournament (FSMT) was hosted this season with a full complement of 20 Major Atom and 16 Major Peewee teams (a fifth Atom division was added this season and it worked out very well).

For the 2008 event (like 2007), the tournament was held “in season” in mid January as this timing works better than post season with the challenges of Easter and teams having already “wrapped-up” their season. The plan is to continue this in 2009.

Once again the organizing committee did an outstanding job in running this tournament on a breakeven + basis while raising a $2,000 donation for palliative care as part of the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital fund raising initiative. The OTMH fund has recognized this tournament’s efforts for the last several years and acknowledges the contributions by displaying the FSMT on their “Community Partners” wall – Well Done!

The FSMT tournament committee would again like to thank all of the Town Rep or House League teams who kindly agreed to schedule changes to accommodate this event during the season. While we tried to minimize the disruptions, we do recognize that this change did displace some teams.

5.      Our Timbit IP program continued its success with strong parent response and volunteer support. As part of a recent OMHA Development Workshop we were asked to present out Timbit Program as a “Best Practices” example for other centres.

We were also fortunate in having a number of our participants involved in the Tim Hortons commercial events with Sidney Crosby (an original Timbit). It was a very memorable event for those fortunate youngsters and a positive reflection on how well our program is regarded.

6.      From the Hockey / Volunteer Development side, we continued to run a number of clinics again this season to support our volunteers. Thanks to Liz Opratko for taking on the coordinator role (again). With the ongoing changes in the NCCP program to a more streamed approach, we ran both Development programs as well as Coach clinics and Refreshers. We also conducted CHIP clinics, several HTCP Trainers clinics and a number of Speak Out clinics to get ready for the season.

We were also selected by the OMHA to run a “pilot” combined clinic where registrants received their CHIP, NCCP Coach and Speak Out certification during one, 2 day clinic.

With the more stringent certification requirements being cascaded into House League this area continues to be a more and more challenging task.

7.      House League Goalie Program – 2007/08 marked the second year of our highly successful House League Goalie Program. This season we expanded the program to two 10 week sessions with 16 hours per week in each session. This scheduling provided us with 128 training spots to support our student goalies. Special thanks to Adele Arsenault for carrying on with her great admin work for a second year and we are looking forward to her efforts in 2008/09.

8.      MOHA Use of Gyms – In 2007/08 We introduced a new program to allow our coaches to book “free” Gym time to conduct off ice Team building or practice session at no cost to the team. MOHA booked 27 hours a week of gym time through the Town at very low rates as a cost effective alternative to ice time for coaches and or teams wishing to add extra activity. Booking rules were established to maximize the number of teams that could benefit and the program was very well received.. Improvements are planned for 2008/09.

9.      Our “Guidelines for Coaches” introduced seven years ago was updated again and posted on our web site to increase its availability to all. We also took the same approach with the companion “Convenors’ Guide” and had this material “borrowed” by other associations (e.g., Ancaster).

10.  March Break – In response to member feedback in our 2006/07 survey, we eliminated a week of scheduled games during March Break to allow families to commit to vacation plans without feeling that they were letting their team down and to reduce the extremely short bench games that can be a challenge at this time of year. This was well received by almost all.

11.  In 2007/08 MOHA continued with electronic carding and rostering for all House League players and volunteers. This process is running smoother and MOHA officially rostered well over 100 House League teams last season.

Once again, thanks to our Office Admin support for finding “creative” ways to help teams meet all of the certification criteria.

Our challenge for 2008/09 continues to be to ensure that all coaches realize that even though the process is electronic they still need to submit their team and rostering request through the office.

Feedback

We distributed evaluation surveys again this season to provide members with an opportunity to express their opinions. We are in the process of reviewing these surveys to consider the comments and suggestions as well as input into the coach selection process.

The question we asked this year about the March Break process gives a strong indication that our members do want to have the “game off” flexibility to schedule family plans and we will likely continue this practice for 2008/09.

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Looking forward to 2008 / 09

Our plans for 2008 / 09 are to continue our focus on improving the quality of our program as well as trying to ice as many teams as possible.

Ice Times – Amount, Allocation and Scheduling

Available ice hours, allocation blocks and related cost considerations remain the biggest challenge facing us in 2008/09 and impacts both House League and Town Rep directly.

The Town’s acquisition of the Joshua’s Creek Arenas facility provided a significant increase in available “prime” Town hours for MOHA, and allowed us to eliminate 6:00 AM week day practices for House League. Subject to the Town’s annual allocation formula for hours and our potential for continued growth we will have our annual challenge of sorting out ice blocks, schedules and times.

Even with incremental Town hours, MOHA still requires a significant number of Ice Sport hours, (26 last season). What this means is that MOHA is the only minor sports group requiring significant “private” hours.

We are waiting for an initial allocation proposal from the Town to get a more definitive picture of the proposed blocs for 2008/09.

MOHA will continue its efforts to improve our overall ice position, in terms of all aspects of our ice position with the Town.

The pressure on overall ice availability and therefore participation constraints lead to essentially zero growth and an absolute decline in player count for 2005/06. Fortunately we are able to report better news for 2006/07 and 2007/08 and we anticipate that we will have continued growth in 2008/09.

Overall Registrations

House League Volunteer Development

Developing the capabilities of our volunteers remains a high priority. During 2007 / 08 we once again hosted a number of clinic to support our volunteers. This will be continued in 2008/09. A complete list of our currently scheduled clinics has been posted on our web site at www.moha.on.ca

Repeat Programs

For 2008/09 we plan to repeat two of our recently developed programs that have proven to be a huge success.

·         HL Goalie Program - will be repeated and structured similar to last year as a great program to assist in the development of our HL goalies – Third year for this program.

·         MOHA Use of Gyms – This program introduced last season will be offered again for 2008/09. We plan to change the hours blocked from 7- 10 to 6 – 9 in response to feedback we received in our initial season as it will provide more opportunity for our younger teams.

New Programs

Continuous improvement should always be a key objective. For 2008/09 there are a number of areas that we would like to improve. Two of them are:

·         Coach Mentor Program – With support and material from our internal sources and the OMHA we would like to pilot a Coach Mentor program within House League. Providing additional support for our coaching staff is key to providing an improved program to our participants.

·         Consistent Stats – In 2007/08 our plan to use ITSportsNet for consistent league stats did not work out. For 2008/09 our objective is to revisit this process and try to provide a more consistent vehicle for all divisions. Special thanks to Reggie Nasu who stepped up and helped us out this past season.

·         Sponsorship – Sponsors are a key component of our program and we need to find more ways to nurture our sponsors through what I will refer to as “care and feeding”. A number of organizations have sponsored us once or twice but we have not done a good job of truly showing our appreciation and thanking them for their support which in turn encourages their on-going commitment.

Thanks

Many individuals have helped out in a variety of roles and taken on a number of tasks in this and prior seasons. I would once again like to thank them for their support in what has become an increasingly challenging environment.

From a House League perspective, I would like to once again thank all of my Senior Convenors, Convenors and other league officials. We would not have a program without these individuals and we all need to keep that in mind. I have been pleased to see our role of Senor Convenor evolve the way it has in empowering these individuals to run their own divisions. I hope this continues into the future.

In closing, I would like to personally thank Mike, the executive and our board whose efforts allow this association to provide a top quality hockey experience for over 4,000 young athletes, House League and Town Rep.

A lot of good things happen in minor hockey in Oakville. We should all take pride in that and congratulate each other on sharing our successes.

Have a safe and sunny summer and don’t forget to volunteer next year!

Submitted for consideration by

Wayne Moorehead
Vice President, House League

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