Mankato Area Hockey Association

MAHA shares its ice with with many other users, such as the Mankato Figure Skating Club, Mankat East and West boys and girls high school teams, the MSU Mean's and Women's teams, three men's leagues, an intramural league, and public skating/hockey. Keeping a functional schedule between all parties involved is not always an easy one, but with the patience, understanding, and support of our members we are able to fulfill many of our members ice needs.

Believe it or not, there are MANY factors that go into your ice schedule day in and day out. A brief synopsis of what it takes to figure out the MAHA schedule:

1. MAHA must decide, in June, what weekends they will host their home tournaments. This, of course, is difficult as we need to predict which teams we will field. Once decided upon, these weekends are booked at ASA.

2. In July, our scheduler sits down with Paul Ostoff at ASA and decides what ice time needs we have for the upcoming season. Paul then combines our request with that of the MSU Men and Women, the four high school teams, the MFSC, the Men's leagues, and public skating. We then receive our potential hours in early August to begin scheduling from.

3. Once the hours are received from Paul, our scheduler must input every single hour of ice by hand into our scheduling softward. This take roughly a full 40 hour week to accomplish.

4. Home tournament times are inputted.

5. Speical programs are inputted such as Advanced Goalies, Girls Initiation, and Monday Night Small Area Games.

6. Speical nights are pinpointed such as holidays, MSU college home game nights, East/West games, etc. This is done to ensure that no team is getting scheduled more often than others when it comes to these nights.

7. The in house teams are scheduled, which is especially difficult when you factor in the early start times during our five home tournament weekends.

8. Late practices are pinpointed. Bantam teams are scheduled for most of them, with the peewee/U12 teams all taking their turn with an occassional late time as well.

9. Away tournaments are factored in and teams are crossed off of potential ice times when they are out of town. Also, an attempt it made to schedule our teams the night before their home tournaments as well.

10. Early ice times are pinpointed (Saturday and Sunday morning ice) and all teams are rotated on those times.

11. With the remaining ice times, lean weeks are poinpointed and all attempts are made to get teams on at least once during the weeks that our high school teams take up a lot of the ice. We then contact Midwest Wireless to see what ice times are available down there, and subesquently book those times as best we can.

12. At this point the ice times are tabulated to see which teams are heavy and light on ice time before we start scheduling the remaining ice. Of the remaining ice, we start with trying to get every team on at least once during each week, and once on weekends. Once that is done we attempt to go with a second time each week/weekend, and so on. Of course, we must factor in that the Bantam teams receive 10 more hours at home than the peewees, who receive 10 more hours at home than the squirts.

13. Starting in 2007-2008 we will be factoring in dryland sessions at the Sports Insitute as well.

14. At this point we are able to pinpoint where teams are in need of ice time and arrangements are attempted to skate at alternative sites such as New Ulm, Waseca, LeSueur, and out at the Schulz's.

15. Once the season starts and teams start scheduling games, teams start giving back ice when they schedule away games and are looking to receive that ice back at another time. It can be VERY difficult to find ice for teams once all of the various factions have received their ice for the season. Team managers turn in requests for ice time and, based on need, the best possible solutions are sought out and attempted. This, of course, does not work out as often as we would like. We are now forced to make due with the ice that we have available, and need to be as flexible as possible.

16. Down the stretch run of the season we begin factoring in playoff teams. We attempt to allow teams who qualify for the playoffs to have some additional ice late in the season to prepare for their posteason tournaments.

With all of this said, and along the line all season, we attempt to keep every team on task to hit their mark for allotted ice times. This, of course, is extremely difficult when you are relying on ice that is as in demand as ours is in town.

We realize that your ice times are not always optimum for your schedule or lifestyle, but we do ask that you realize all of the pitfalls that are a part of scheduling ice for the association. There is a high demand, and a relatively low supply, therefore all factions using ice in Mankato are asked to be flexible and understanding about their schedule.