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What is your varsity team/hockey association/community doing to encourage more girls to try girls hockey?

Several communities struggle in any given year to keep their varsity and/or youth numbers up. They don't have the depth of the hockey culture of the northern teams or the hockey hotbeds in the cities.

In Austin we have put on a clinic during the first weekend the rink opens (early October). The varsity girls host this and it is free for all girls. The hockey association covers the cost of the ice, is there to help with equipment and to visit with the parents about reduced fees for 1st year participants. They have free hot dogs and refreshments at the close of the clinic.

Each year that we have done this we have added double digit numbers...spread out among the age groups. 10/u (in the years that we had enough), 12/u (the clinic recruits saved this team one year) and 14/u or JV. Its a little tougher to start in 14/u or JV nowadays, but that is what this is all about. Getting more girls to paricipate in this fun sport.

The varsity coach also has a fun night during the season, where all girls now matter what age can come out and practice with the varsity team. They have a great time and enjoy pizza and refreshments with the varsity players and coaches afterwards. This is a little more towards "maintaining" the hockey players. But, the more fun they have the better the chance is that they will talk their friends into going out for it.

Please share with us the activities that have been successful in your area. It may be successful for other areas as well. It is an uphill climb and lot of work for the volunteers. But it is well worth it.

Woodbury Youth Hockey and the Woodbury HS Team and coach launched a "Strive for 25 Program" to add 25 more girls last fall they ended up adding almost 50. They had a free 2 hour block to try hockey - they first weekend that school started - they brought out equipment and rink provided skates. They followed that up with cheap/affordable Intro to Hockey program 12 sessions of 1 hour each over the following 6 weekends with sessions on Saturday and Sunday. They are repeating an Intro to Hockey again now just after the season to attract more first time girls. I they have relied on parents and current players to recruit and had a high ratio of coaches to kids on the ice.

Woodbury did this to try and build numbers to support both Woodbury HS and the new Eastridge HS (opening fall of 2009) girls programs.

This is the perfect year to build the number of girls skating - Olympic Year, Olympic Team based at Blaine, Gophers Ranked #1.....

I know that the Chaska high school team has a mentoring program. The high school girls are each assigned 2-3 youth girls (from the u6 and u10 teams). The high school girls skate at the younger girls' practices, and vice versa. They also have pizza parties together and go to other womens' games like the gophers.

In my opinion growing girls hockey comes from the parents not the kids. I was around Edina when the girls youth hockey program growth started exploding. I think it all started at the top with Association board members and key parents wanting to make girls hockey important in the community. What I observed was a Board willing to say that girls hockey was to be treated the same as boys hockey in that the boys didn't get any preferences over the girls in ice, coaching, development etc. As a matter of fact since the girls program was in its infancy it may have received more attention than the boys side. A girls coordinator was appointed (there's not a boys coordinator) and a special girls mite program was instituted (there's no boys-only option). Girls hockey was embraced because there were hockey dads, moms, siblings that went out of their way to make it work.

I have heard of too many communities that treat the girls program as a second class of citizen. They have separate boards that don't have as much power as the boys or they treat the girls program as an after thought. To grow girls hockey it has to be as important as the boys program.

Once the adults started promoting to other parents, the girls started wanting to be a part of the girls hockey program. In other words it became the cool thing to do in Edina for parents and kids. My daughter is one example. We had no intention of putting my daughter in hockey. It was the parents of a friend of my daughters from grade school that pushed us to join. We heard that hockey was too expensive and that the parents were nuts. And guess what, it is expensive and there are some nutty parents but after a year or two we were hooked and wouldn't trade it for any other sport.