Attn: All ARHL Members

It has come to our attention that not as many members as we thought are aware of the selection process and this may lead to frustration with one’s particular session team.

Because of this, we wanted to be as transparent as possible to give everyone a better understanding of how teams are selected.

We rank ALL the players from Top to Bottom into groups of 4 (for a 4-team session, 5 for 5 teams, etc.)

We then take the Top 3 groups of 4 (so the 12 best players overall) and in 3 individual groups of 4 and literally pull them out of a bucket one by one.

After those 3 rounds, we do the same thing ranking 4 remaining best Defensemen…

…then 4 best-remaining Forwards…then we repeat and continue the process until every player is on a team.

At the end, goalies are either assigned or randomly selected.  In this session, they were randomly selected.

We believe this is the fairest and random process that both ensures competitive balance and allows members to have the opportunity to enjoy a mix of new teammates every session.

There is NOTHING we can do when only the Top or Bottom half of a team shows up because of poor attendance OR if players get injured and can’t play!

The overall enjoyment and success of a particular team almost always comes down to attendance.

Again, NOTHING can be done when a team’s 3 best players don’t show and their 3 worst always show up…players should be able to recognize this is not a team selection issues but rather their own team’s attendance issues.

Aside from a couple of exceptions during the Covid years, this has been the method we’ve used for the last 16+ sessions.

This method of ranking players and randomly selecting them from within their ranking has greatly improved the ARHL’s overall camaraderie and sportsmanship.

This will be the method we are going to use for the future sessions and we hope all members that choose to continue in the ARHL will do their part to be positive members.

We do acknowledge that not everyone is going to agree on who is better or worse than whom, but we do try out best.

We will gladly accept any input from members in regard to player rankings.

If you would like to provide a player ranking for us to consider, please rank in order your best 12 or more league players.

Please email your ranking to arhlsecretary@gmail.com We will do our best to keep it confidential, but we can’t promise that it will remain so.

Hopefully, this information will allow all members to have a more positive attitude towards the ARHL and the Team they are on for a particular session.

Sincerely,

Ray, Chuck, Dave, and Derek