Sep 05, 2018 | hcassidy | 1246 views
A Letter From the President Brett Lyons
Letter from the President:
Welcome all of our Twister players, families, and hockey
fans to this upcoming 2018/19 hockey season!
I was humbled to be elected as President of the Grand Valley
Minor Hockey Association, and am only a small part of a fantastic, enthusiastic,
and knowledgeable executive board.
To share some background about myself, I moved to Grand Valley in the summer of 2013, and am married with two children in the organization (playing Bantam and Tyke this year). I started playing hockey at age four in what is now the Georgina Minor Hockey Association and began refereeing at the age of 14, which I continue to do. I am passionate about hockey and love everything about the sport.
I am excited to see our registration numbers push past the 100 mark for the first time in several years! This holds a lot of significance as many organizations are experiencing declining enrollment while Grand Valley's numbers have been steadily increasing.
We will be icing a popular Initiation Program (IP) and have added a newly appointed position of IP Director to help this program run smoothly. The IP program is for players between the ages of 3-6, and emphasizes fun and skill development with station-based practices and informal modified games.
We have one Tyke team (age 7), which will be our first Tyke group to follow the OMHA half-ice guidelines for game play. This year we are pleased to have two Novice teams (age 8)! With our two novice teams, and the skill we have at that level, we will be putting together an additional Rostered Select team comprised of players from both teams.
Continuing up the age categories, we will have one team for Atom (ages 9-10), Peewee (ages 11-12), and Bantam (ages 13-14) age groups. This is great news for our organization, as Grand Valley has not always had the numbers to ice teams at these older age categories. Clearly, the past and present executive and coaches have done an outstanding job rebuilding our organization!
Coaches are in place for all our teams and everyone is excited to get on the ice!
We have many events planned for the year and I hope to see all our hockey families participating and getting involved in our organization. To name a few, on September 15th from 10am-3pm, we have our annual bottle drive fundraiser (save your empties!), on September 22-23, minor hockey is running a food booth at the Grand Valley Fall Fair, and on December 1st we have an exciting day planned for Hockey Day in Grand Valley. Each team also has a hometown tournament to host. You can keep up-to-date with the organization calendar on the website and on social media.
This year the older teams (Novice and above) will be starting the season with some fun ball hockey on the arena floor. We anticipate that the ice will be in and ready for our first skates around September 26th. Please watch the website and your email for confirmation.
Again, welcome back and I hope everyone has an enjoyable experience of hockey this season.
Executive Team
Brett Lyons