Stillwater Area Hockey Association

Your son is still mite eligible and as such this truly is a try-out.  It appears that we will need to move a couple kids back to mites due to MN Hockey restriction of only allowing 1/3 of a squirt team to consist of mite age eligible players.  If you would prefer to not have your child go through the tryout and risk the “rejection” of not making squirts, please let me know as soon as possible.  Otherwise, we will send kids back to mites based on the evaluations. Please review the rest of the C Program pages and if you have questions, please contact me sooner than later. If I don't have the answer, we will track it down. The try-out / evaluation part of the season can be the most stressful for some, so lets do what we can to make sure we are all working together on the same information.

As you know, there is a 1/3 rule we must follow through MN Hockey. This is not an Association rule and there is no flexibility to it. The current numbers indicate that if all our current mite eligible players try-out, some will need to return to Mite 3. We need to factor in the possibility that some players may elect to go to other organizations for a variety of reasons during or just after A/B try-outs. When this happens, it affects the over all number of squirt age players and thus affects the number of players that are squirt age that want to play up. There are several factors that play into this process, most of which we have no control over and no authority to change the rules.

I can tell you from experience that getting cut back to mites can be hard for players, but they can learn from it also. My oldest son was in that situation a few years back and happened to be the youngest in the group. As things would go, that year the cuts were done by age and he ended up playing mites 3 again. It's all what we make of it and we have several great local programs like Grass Roots to be involved with. When the dust settles, the kids just want to play hockey so lets support them while we work within the MN hockey and D2 rules. Thanks for your understanding and we look forward to seeing you and your player at C try-outs.