Mass hockey in the truest sense, i.e. the kids and players is just fine. Mass hockey as an organization is a farce and needs a major over haul.
We have lost spots to the national festival camps over the past decade and mainly because we send political kids instead of the best players. We have guys involved who are only there when their kids are playing and do so to make sure they are taken care of. We used to get 20 + slots, now we get around 10.
We do everything wrong to give the perception that we are in a turmoil but "we", i.e. the kids are not, Mass hockey is.
Here are a few examples.
We send our supposed top U-14 kids(again, very political) to Sweden instead of the festival. The first green book comes out and it usually has the kids at festival and not the kids in Sweden in it, thus our supposed top 20 are left out.
At the national championship level, Mass hockey has been fighting with the MBHL/EHF for years and does not allow them to participate. So when our U-12, U-14 and U-16's go to natls they dont see the best kids. This is crazy and gives the usa guys the impression that our teams are soft, when in fact they are not. This is all done so Mass hockey guys can make money off of their select teams and not in the best interest of the kids/players.
The main reason it looks so bad though is because we have a watered down product. In Mass we now have about 40 supposed AAA orgs, it is a farce and way to many teams. Mass hockey needs to step in and not allow them to register in that catagory. We have kids who couldnt make their A town team leaving and playing "AAA". Just look at the EHF, they have now added a AA level, this on top of the AAA Elite and AAA levels. Now we dont even have AAA, we have AAA Elite, all so the owners can make more money of the families. In the end, they destroy town hockey by doing this.
It carries straight thru to the hs levels. Mass hs hockey is watered down beyond belief and is a shell of what it used to be.
We mnow have the EJ, the AJ, the IJ, the Empire on and on. All these tier 3C junior leagues on top of high school and prep leagues. How can you possibly have a good league with parity if we have 500 teams all spread out. You need to play against good comp to get better and in mass, that is not the case. The kids are there but are being over looked because of the geniusues running the leagues/teams, who are all about the money
They have tried to shore up the hs level by offering a supposed elite fall league, hoping it replicates the MN league but does not. They end up giving the teams to puppet regimes who bring all their kids on it. For example one prep school guy will be given a region or area team and he loads it with his winter kids, leaving out about 75% of the best players. They even screw that up. Instead of picking the best players with outside evaluators, they again do it on their own with their own agenda, which has nothing to do with developiong the best players.
Mass hockey is fine but the guys running it need to get out of the way.