Welcome to the 2006-2007 hockey season. As in years past, there have been a number of exciting developments and notable changes associated with the CBHL, the PVAHA and USA Hockey.

The CBHL has peen working on improving the quality and level of competition in the league. This season we will start the preseason Jamboree placement tournament. In this tournament teams will play a cross-section of other CBHL teams to ensure that they are placed with teams that have similar caliber of play. The intention here is to encourage teams to play at their highest competitive level, to ensure teams are not “over-matched” or totally dominate other teams in their divisions, and to foster more fun and more competitive games during the season. Will the system be perfect? Absolutely not. But we do believe it is a step in the right direction in order to ensure our players enjoy the sport as much as possible by giving them a chance to be challenged, but not dominate or be dominated during games.

USA Hockey has instituted new Standards of Play throughout the country. The enforcement of rules related to holding, interference, use of the stick, obstruction and other infractions that impede the speed and skill development in the game will be enforced throughout the season – similar to the rule enforcement established by the NHL. As you can imagine, this has required a great amount of training for our officials and coaches, and players will need to adjust to the new Standards of Play. During the preseason jamboree these new standards of play rules will be in place, officials will be evaluated and instructed, and coaches and players will have an opportunity to adjust to the rules. We are expecting more penalty calls – particularly early in season. We anticipate that games early in the season will not have the tempo we would like to see. However, we fully expect that the players will learn, the speed of the game will improve, and the new Standards of Play will encourage speed, skill development, and create a very exciting brand of hockey throughout the nation.

USA Hockey has established a working group to monitor the progress and application of the new Standards of Play and we are encouraging parents, players and coaches to be active by providing comments to their club representatives, becoming familiar with the new Standards of Play, and encouraging all participants to be patient as we enter this new era of hockey.

We continue to work with our officials to eliminate fighting. We are encouraging officials to NOT call a fighting penalty on players who do not retaliate. We are also encouraging instigator calls to be made whenever the official can identify the instigator in a fight.

We have continued our Zero Tolerance policy for on ice behavior, and are pleased with the progress we have made to making area hockey a good clean sport.

We continue our outstanding relationship with the Washington Capitals and have reinstituted the Shootout competition, Player of the Month honors, and game/ice plans at MCI Arena. In addition, the area organizations are planning a College Hockey Festival later in the year to provide a forum for players interested in playing collegiate hockey.

We want to thank the area ice rinks and rink owners for their support to the CBHL and would like to encourage all CBHL members to get out to the rink, go to a public skating event, or sign up for one of the outstanding clinics offered by area ice rinks and organizations.

We welcome our new clubs this year – Peninsula, Southern Maryland, and the Maryland Monarchs. The addition of these shows the health and growth of area hockey, and the league is particularly pleased to see growth in the southern part of the league.

We encourage all players, coaches, parents and farns to be models of good sportsmanship and to be good examples and ambassadors of our fine sport. If you have comments, suggestions, or would like to volunteer, please contact me at mikebancroft@msn.com

Good luck to all CBHL teams for a competitive, successful and safe hockey season.

Mike Bancroft
CBHL Commissioner