Creation and Division of Teams

Dividing of Teams

Teams are going to be capped at 15 rostered players and one rostered goalie per team. Teams will be built through a "draft", conducted on the season payment due date after the final fees have been collected. The draft will consist of team captains picking players in snake draft style beginning with goalies and proceeding through player skills levels to ensure even skill distribution. No rostered players will be added after the draft as the jersey order will be submitted the following day.

Team Captains

During season sign-ups I will be asking for volunteers for team captains. Captains will be assigned on a first come first serve basis. Captains need to be a skill level of D or higher and need to be available to participate in the draft. In addition to the draft, captains will be responsible for the following items: To set up their team's bench app, to coordinate subs and goalie coverage, to either handle the team pucks themselves or ensure someone is responsible for them, to ensure that their team's locker room is empty and clean following each game, to handle and launder the sub jerseys each week, and to communicate if there are any issues that need to be addressed. Additional duties may be added.

Friend Requests

Following the difficulty of balancing teams while honoring many large friend pairing requests for Summer 2025, we will move forward with the plan to only allow for a single (1) pairing request per player. This will still allow spouses, siblings, etc. to play together. The caveat to this being that during sign ups, both players must request the pairing. If both parties do not request it, or if three people try to do a three-way request, etc. the request will simply be ignored.

Jerseys

Every team will be assigned a color and every player on that team will have one jersey in that color so that we will no longer need to worry about whether to wear dark or light. We are not doing reversibles. Jerseys will be customized with player names and numbers. Jerseys will change each season: The first jersey will be the primary Rink Rats logo, after that we will do some fun things so that players don't end up with a closet full of identical jerseys.

Season to Season

The current plan is to change up teams from season to season so that players get the chance to meet and play with new people and develop new team dynamics.

Substitutes

Beginning with the Fall 2025 Season we are looking to allow players to join a substitute list rather than signing up for the full season. This will allow players who may not be able to make the majority of the games to still get a game here and there without having to pay the fee. Substitute sign ups will come out a week or two before the season starts. Substitutes will not pay a fee, but are not guaranteed ice time and are not eligible for a jersey. A few extra jerseys will be purchased in each team color for subs to use, but they will be returned to the team captain after each game. All substitutes will be added to a Google Sheet accessible to the team captains and it will be up to the team captains to utilize substitutes if they so choose but only if the team has fewer than the 15 players on the bench.

Goalies

Goalies will be assigned to teams on a first come first serve basis (e.g. if we have 6 teams and 8 goalies sign up for a season, the first 6 goalies to have signed up will be assigned to those 6 teams). Once a goalie has been assigned to a team, they are assigned to that team for the duration of the season. All goalie substitutes will be added to a Google Sheet accessible to the team captains and it will be up to the team captains to coordinate substitutes.