AHA expands tiers, Spiders on move to new C3

July 25, 2011

Following multiple post-season captains meetings with the league admins, the AHA has finally announced that a new tier — C3 — will be added between D1 and C2 for the upcoming 2011–12 Winter season. A little background from the league:

Over the past few weeks we have gathered great feedback from you via Post-Season Captains meetings as well as from many players who participated in the Player Survey. We appreciate your feedback and have used that to continue to make AHA Hockey the Premier Adult Hockey League. AHA’s primary goals are parity and safety. With the successful growth of the league and advancement of player and team skill, we feel the time has come to add an additional tier. In the past winter league, we had six tiers to separate skill levels: B1, B2, C1, C2, D1 and D2.

Beginning with the 2011–2012 Winter Program, the four C and D skill levels will be expanded to five tiers.

To maintain parity, AHA has historically encouraged the movement of teams when we felt it was appropriate for a team to participate at a higher or lower skill level. This will continue to be our highest priority at all skill levels of AHA and we encourage all Captains to support this effort by limiting your roster to players consistent with the overall skill level of your team’s placement.

We believe the creation of this new tier will assist team movement decisions and enable groupings, which will afford teams an easier transition to the next skill level.

Adding an additional skill level between the “C” and “D” groupings will help alleviate the congestion of team movement in these tiers, improve overall parity, and provide an additional level of post-season playoff tournament opportunity. As in the past, our lowest tier will continue to be geared towards the true/graduating beginner player to allow them a chance to grow their skills.

C3 will look a lot like last season’s D1, with the upper portion of playoff-contending teams making up the bulk of the new tier. The non-playoff contenders from last season will largely stay at D1, with the top D2 teams moving up. And the top three D1 teams from last year — Diablos, Lumberjacks, Northern Horde — actually are slated to make the jump to C2.

Conspicuously absent from the C2 bus are the D1 Spiders. Despite the top record in D1 last year, and a long playoff run, the D1 Spiders have instead been slotted to stay at C3, thanks to impending roster changes submitted to the league in May, where a number of Spiders are looking to sign contracts among C2-level teams.

Courtesy the AHA, here are the initial 2011–12 Winter Tier placements, for C2 and below (with prior-season tier in parentheses):