Tiger Hills Hockey League holds fall meeting; Wawanesa Jets ask for leave of absence
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- Published on Thursday, October 3, 2013
By: Lanny Stewart
myWestman.ca
The Tiger Hills Hockey League will have a familiar team return for the upcoming season.
The senior league held its annual fall meeting recently and THHL president Wayne Deschouwer says the Gladstone Lakers have returned and will once again participate in the league after taking a one-year leave of absence last season. Meanwhile, the Wawanesa Jets have requested to take a year off from the league, meaning, similar to last season, a total of 14 teams will take to the ice in the THHL in 2013-2014.
The league will also remain a two division setup. The Eastern Division will consist of the returning Lakers, Carberry Plainsmen, Cartwright Clippers, Glenboro Nordics, Neepawa Farmers, Pilot Mound Pilots and Swan Lake Cougars. The Western Division meanwhile, will consist of the Boissevain Border Kings, Deloraine Royals, Hartney Blues, Killarney Shamrocks, Melita Bisons, Souris Elks and Reston Rockets, who will be joining forces this season with Virden.
Other changes to the league this year is a lengthier regular season schedule. Instead of 19 games for each team a year ago, the schedule has been bumped to 24 games. However, there will no longer be any cross-divisional play. Each team will play their respective divisional opponent four times (twice at home, twice on road). Last year's schedule had each team play one game against every team from the other division.
"The only time the divisions cross will be in the finals," said Deshouwer. "Some of the teams from the east have players coming from Winnipeg and we were asking them to travel sometimes three and a half hours one way. That's seven hours total travel for a hockey game. It's the same thing for some of the western teams coming east. We were asking guys to travel quite a ways for a hockey game.
"At the end of the night, economics and maybe some common sense kinda took over and we realized it's just a bit too far to travel."
The regular season will also begin a week earlier compared to years past. The season gets underway the last weekend of October.
New website
The league has also unveiled a new website. Deschouwer says the newly-designed site will now include regular season and playoff stats and a listing of all league suspensions. Check it out here.
