Hi All,

Aaron here, over the last few days we were informed of some incorrect assumptions being made around the new Season, The Club & The Committee, we would like to clear all of these things up.

The committee members are Matt Becky, Aaron Brookes (myself), Andrew Reynolds, Belinda Brookes (treasurer), Scott Jeffcoat, TMD Taylor, and Michael Petterson. These people were not "hand-picked." We sent out multiple notifications via email for nominations, but this is all that responded to.

Alex MacKenzie is the Chief of Coaches

Jasmine Taylor is the Chief of Officials

The club is 100% independent of the rink. We hire the rink's time, and we will collaborate with them on marketing and growth plans for hockey and the rink in general. If anyone wants to help us out with that, please let us know. So, if people turn up and don't pay, that comes out of the club's money, not the rink's.

There have been some misconceptions that our revamp of how Div2 & Div3 is done, the teams etc was to push out unwanted people, and teams & stack the teams.

This could not be further from the truth.

The committee chose to go back to the original teams/jerseys, so we could standardise the divisions & make it "vertical", this also goes for when Div1 is playing.  ISL will be the only division where the teams don't match any other division.  Doing it this way allows us to promote internally & bring players up through the divisions. We will also now be running a club championship, so the team with the combined wins across all three divisions will be declared the Club Champions.  

Our intention is also to be able to form some proper travel teams across the Divisions so we can enter tourneys like ACC, Tassie etc as a club, not just some random teams.

Regarding the actual teams/jerseys that we chose to go with, they are established ones, owned by the club itself.  While Alex has used Pit Crew for Max Cup & some interstate tourneys, it is an actual Max team.  We could go all the way back to those of us who were playing at the rink on Sunday mornings, before it was officially opened to the public, we had teams like the Ninja's etc.

How the teams were put together was a group consideration of people who needed to pair with someone else to travel, but we wanted to try to balance the teams as much as possible, so games were not one-sided.  After all the time given for people to nominate, we only had 26 people nominate for Div3, whereas we had nearly 40 nominate for Div2, A lot of those are people who were in Div3 previously & wanted to make the jump to Div2.  Contrary to what some have said, not one of the Captains got their dream team & got to stack it their way.

We also need to keep in mind, that we are short on goalkeepers.

I was told that there were potentially 2 full teams that did not nominate for Div3 because we said that all players had to go into the draft.  If that was the case, you should have come to us & we could have worked something out.

We as the committee want everyone's help & input to grow not only our membership but the game in NSW back to where it used to be.

Our door is always open, feel free to reach out.

Thanks

Aaron