Hi all,

Welcome to the 2023-24 hockey season! This is just a quick note to share a few details about upcoming evaluations.

For those who don’t know me, my name is Trish Sadoway, the U15 Division Director. I have been involved at many levels of SPMHA hockey – coaching, various team roles and this is my fourth season as the division director. I have three kids who play SPMHA hockey – two in U18 and one U21. I am a fair and equitable person and believe that the evaluation process will place your players on teams of an appropriate level to their skillset where they can be both developed and challenged within the framework of the teams that we will be able to form. I will communicate as much as possible to the membership and pledge to get this as right as I can.

If your player is new to U15 – you will notice a few differences from the younger divisions. The first is that there are two streams – Tiers 1, 2, 3 Contact and Tiers 1, 2, 3 Non-Contact. The number of contact spots for players this season will depend on registration and team placement, which means that it is possible that all players interested in a contact spot will have the opportunity to play on a contact team.

Secondly, unlike younger divisions where there is an upward push to fill team spots – in U15, players can be moved up and down and from contact to non-contact and back (or vise versa) during the evaluation process. We are not trying to confuse or disappoint players – but this movement is often needed for evaluation scores. U15 evaluations are based on game play only. There is no evaluated skills session.

Lastly, U15 can not form teams until the majority of players are released from the AAA/AA stream, so there is a delay on when we start and finish evaluations, this can also affect player movement once we get started. Players who are released from the elite stream are evaluated based on SPMHA evaluations criteria and not the fact that they were in tryouts for the elite stream.

To avoid having too many different places to get information for the upcoming evaluations, after this initial email has gone out, almost all communication will be through the website https://www.spmha.ab.ca/. Once evaluations are underway, it will be important for everyone to watch the website for evaluation game updates and which players will play on which dates as the player groupings will change throughout the process .

Please note that the pre-evaluation games are scheduled to run September 5-10. These are non-contact games to give your players an opportunity to have a little fun and dust off their skates before evaluations. Goaltender evaluations are September 13th, the fist evaluation game is September 13th and they will run until the 23rd.

U15 players are evaluated on a choice of contact or non-contact and position. Should your player’s registration be missing this information – I will contact you directly. Please respond so we can ensure that your player is evaluated accordingly.

I will be publishing further information over the coming weeks including evaluation groups and requests for volunteers (again please note that it is important to follow the website and refer back during evaluations). The website will also include more information on the SPMHA Evaluation Town Hall meeting… this is a great online meeting to get many questions answered. In addition, if you should “hear anything through the grapevine” regarding the U15 Division that you’d like clarification on and can’t find on the SPMHA website or FAQs, please don’t hesitate to email (u15.director@spmha.ab.ca) and ask – my goal is to try to respond to most inquiries within 24 hours of receipt and I would rather answer and have accurate information out there being propagated than misinformation.

Have a great season,

Trish Sadoway

SPMHA U15 Division Director

Posted in U15 Posts

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