JMS Hockey

I am not saying this would ever really happen, but it would be REALLY cool to setup some type of tournament for all the JMSHockey players. I'm sure our very impressive developer could put together some type of auto draft for those interested and have a tournament bracket. Thoughts?

It has happened a couple of times... a good time had by all except the "Debbie Downers" who prefer things a certain way...THEIR way...and ONNLY their way. :-)

Suppressing the cringe at this topic (having only just got over PTSD from the last tournament), I actually did throw out the idea a few months ago, before we moved to the new JMS website. I had asked folks to post if they would be interested in helping develop and run a tournament. Frankly, the easy stuff is administering it. What we need volunteers for is to set up the parity (so we don't have hit squads looking for me personally afterwards) and to manage that parity and inevitable complaints that arise during the tourney. If you are interested in helping to set it up, send a message through the support line. I'll also dig through the posts from the old site to see who volunteered before (you cannot escape!). We have some ideas and I can get this rolling. It's just one of those many "it would be cool if we could..." things that always gets shoved to the back burner behind trying to keep up with the day to day stuff.

Sign me up Barbara! I think this would be a lot of fun. If we could somehow jam all this into a weekend ( or however you prefer ) I can get some volunteers to participate.

How were levels handled in the last tourney? All levels on all teams or different mini tourneys by level?

We split it into upper and lower tiers. There were some edge cases and so I had to decide whether to put that guy in the upper tier (and teammates complain that he couldn't keep up) or lower tier (where opponents claim he's too good for their level). Both of these happened. It was REALLY complicated--I looked at everyone's level permissions and what the captains had said about them (a 3/4 who was just promoted to L4 was not weighted the same as a 3/4 who was promoted several months before, unless the first guy was playing regularly and the second hadn't played in a long time... you see how quickly it gets really messy). I really did my best. And still there were a LOT of folks mad, who let me know. I'm not going through that again. So we'll have a committee set the perms. There are so many moving parts here--what if you have a 3/4/5 team but the goalie is a 2/3? Or a 3/4 team with an L4/5 goalie? At the lower level, a little practice goes a long ways; one of the teams had several practices before the tourney and they did very well. Other teams were mad about that, but what could I do... put a moratorium on practicing before the tourney? That's silly. There was a lot of that going on. Lower level players who had never skated with a ref before were irate that they were getting called on a lot of stuff. Things like that. Andy and I have discussed ways to ameliorate some of the sticky spots. We'll see how it goes.

Teams practiced before the tourney? Oh boy...are we Pro players or something? I recall my team was po'd at me because I was changing lines and not as much concerned with winning as was playing and having a good time. Most of my players had never been in a "game" before, and a few were trying to be Glen Sather. One even stopped showing up. It was sad. I think the tourney is good though...just avoid those who let it go to their head!!!!

I'm totally up for helping put a tourney together in anyway I can! FYI, I'm more of an analytic type.person where I can help make good ideas better but coming up with an initial idea has always been my downfall .... But, I'm willing to do what it'd take to make something like this a reality with out stressing out the admins. Sounds like tons of fun!

I know AHA makes players do evals before joining teams to make sure it's a fair distribution of skillset prior to playing. Would it make sense to do this as a requirement prior to the tournament? Seems like it would solve the issue rather then people guessing what they think they should be...

We do eval players--at every game, pretty much. JMS captains keep an eye out for people who are outliers one way or the other and then we either move them or watch them if we need more data. We did stipulate that people had to have played at least one JMS game before the tourney, to give us some kind of data on them. Preemptive FYI: this thread will stay on track about the tournament (no tangents related to current JMS evaluation process).