Welcome

Welcome; As President of Girls Hockey Calgary (GHC) I have decided to start a blog to provide regular updates to our membership and provide the opportunity for comments on topics that impact GHC. This is my first posting and I plan to update the blog regularly throughout the 2008-2009 season.

The season began with lots of excitement evaluations and selection camps began in early Sept and our Midget AAA's had their first game on Sept 19th, the remaining teams started their season in Oct. We continue to be the largest association in Western Canada with Six hundred and fifteen athletes playing on 37 teams.

This year we kicked off an exciting new initiative. The Rocky Mountain Female Hockey League was created to provide teams in Calgary and surrounding communities an opportunity to compete in larger divisions. We have 5 teams from Calgary participating in the Atom division, 4 teams in the Peewee B division and 3 teams in the Peewee A division. As you can imagine the creation of a new league with teams from five cities comes with a number of challenges and I appreciate everyone's support and patience as we take this significant step to growing female hockey in Southern Alberta.

This year also brought about some significant changes at Hockey Calgary that impacted the start of hockey for all associations throughout Calgary. Hockey Calgary converted from a manual scheduling process to a new computer software. As with most new software program it had its share of bugs which unfortunately caused significant delays in releasing the seeding round schedules to associations and central zone. The association and central zone were all then challenged to schedule practices and referees for the first weekend of play. With many a late night and hard work by the volunteers at Hockey Calgary I believe they have moved past these initial problems and we will see a much smoother scheduling of the second half.

Stay tuned for my next post.