Sandbagging

[Guest]

Does the DVHL ever address sandbagging whether it be on a player, team or organizational level?  They obviously have standings and fairly accurate statistics at their disposal.  I know not every instance of what appears to be sandbagging is the case but I’d guess in most instances what we see or the statistics available to us don’t lie.

[Guest]

I wish they did. There is a team in my sons division that is 11-0 scored 70+ goals and have given up 6.

[Guest]

Sometimes, it’s hard for an organization to know what it really has at time of declaration as well as the caliber of the other teams in the division.  It goes both ways, some teams believe they can compete in a division and then lose practically all games.

There is no doubt that unfortunately some organizations sandbag.

Last year, York BT AA played in a lower division in the EJEPL. At playoff time, the EJEPL made York play in the higher (diamond) division. Clearly York was far superior than the teams in lower division, in fact, were better than many teams in the higher division. I would like the DVHL to explore trying this.  Of course, this comes with lots of headaches like teams playing in lower division in order to guarantee a playoff spot in higher division and etc.  You can’t look at just win loss record but how badly certain teams are crushing other teams. A 10-0 team that wins every game by a couple of goals is one thing but a 10-0 team that wins every game by 10 goals clearly shouldn’t be playing in the division, except AA of course.

[Guest]

I get AA is what it is.  But in the divisions below there appear to be some obvious issues.  Teams squashing the other top teams in their divisions or kids clearly outpacing other kids on the scoresheets in one season or many seasons in a row where organizations have teams in higher divisions.  It just seems so obvious that something is amiss.

[Guest]

I think we are a part of the same division.  It's obvious and very frustrating.

[Guest]

As far as a specific player playing down, not much you can do with that. If the team is truly A level, but you have a quality AA kid, you can't punish him and say he has to go play for another club on an AA team.
I don't know what rules the league has in place to stop this. As one posted pointed out, sometimes you just don't know when you are making declarations. When my son moved to Bantam, our club had a clear cut AA team and then another team where 3/4 of the kids were first years and a lot of them on the smaller size. The coach hadn't been with this group previously so he didn't have a good feel if they could play A so it was decided to play B. It ended up being a mistake. There were a lot of 10-0 games, but for how good we were, we ended in the 3rd place so we weren't the only ones playing down.
The only time I remember the league stepping in was years ago. Wiss had 2 squirt A teams and the one was killing everybody and the DVHL didn't let them into the playoffs.

[Guest]

They encourage it and often mandate it with the B American teams and teams asking to play up that are denied.

[Guest]

Our scholastic lead put an end to one player running up the score, and believe me, we had a lot of it. We had teams where 1 player was putting up 8 out of 10 goals, or 11+ goals. League said 3 goals and they can't score anymore. If they do, not only is the goal not counted, but it's a penalty.

[Guest]

Only way to fix this is to make the dvhl showcase mandatory for all dvhl clubs and not allow outside clubs to take part... have clubs put teams where they think they should go and have the dvhl evaluate the teams... this may include opening an actual B division in the 16u and 18u age groups....

[Guest]

Our scholastic lead put an end to one player running up the score, and believe me, we had a lot of it. We had teams where 1 player was putting up 8 out of 10 goals, or 11+ goals. League said 3 goals and they can't score anymore. If they do, not only is the goal not counted, but it's a penalty.

That’s more of an in house rule.  I wouldn’t advocate for that on a travel level.