A season of firsts for the junior programs

More teams, younger rosters and a few age groups fielding a side for the first time in years. Growth brings its own set of problems.

Registration numbers at the junior end have been climbing for a while now, and this is the season it became obvious. Several age groups are fielding sides that did not exist a couple of years ago, and a few clubs have gone from scrambling for numbers to running a waiting list.

Growth is a better problem than the alternative, but it is still a problem. More teams means more ice, more field time, more coaches and more of the volunteer capacity that was already stretched. The bottleneck is rarely the players.

The clubs that have handled it best seem to be the ones that treated coaching as something to develop rather than something to find. Bringing former players back as assistants is slower than recruiting from outside, and it holds up better.

Whether the numbers hold through the winter is the open question. The first cold snap is traditionally when the enthusiasm gets tested.