"In-house" Squirt programs are all fine and dandy for programs with enough teams to facilitate an "in-house" league.
What about the programs who don't have that ability? I really wish the city slickers out there with all the answers (apparently everyone on this thread) would think about the smaller communities once in a while.
What's happening to our program is absolutely devastating:
All of the bigger communities around us are going to this model, so when our association tries to schedule games with them we're told "sorry, we have an in-house league for our squirts."
So what do we have to do in order to get games? we end up having to travel further than what we would've had to travel before. We have two programs inside an hour's drive where we could get all the games we'd need. Instead, I had to take my son 2.5 hours away on Saturday.
What ends up happening is we have parents that say "we're willing to travel an hour or so, but two hours is too far." This movement will slowly eat away at the smaller clubs and eventually we'll have parents that have to drive upwards of an hour not once, but 3-4 times a week for their kids to participate.
I'll also disagree with the statement that "It is an incontrovertible truth that NOTHING a player does (or doesn't do) at the 10U level really matters when it comes to his/her chances of 'going somewhere with hockey'...unless s/he gets so fed up with the game that s/he quits, of course."
If we want to preach ADM, and it seems all of you are very familiar with this model, you'd know that the optimal "window for trainability" is between the ages of 9-12. This means that EVERYTHING our athletes do between the ages of 8-13 absolutely "really matters when it comes to his/her chances of 'going somewhere in hockey.'"
The letter chasing statement is one I'll agree with. A "bubble" kid is almost always better served being the top player at the lower level. They get more puck touches and generally see more playing time. I've seen a ton of "bubble" kids at the squirt level end up being great high school and junior players.
I think many forget that hockey is, in fact, a "TEAM" sport. systems should never take precedence over skill development, but the trend i'm seeing in the skill development communities is that the emphasis put on individual skill is put above all else. I've seen too many kids with amazing hands and feet that couldn't make or catch a pass to save their life. These are the same kids who end up quitting because they scored 150 goals a season up until the peewee level and can't make the adjustments needed to play at the next level. Why? because they don't know where to play in order to be effective!
One man show hockey is great for YouTube content, but terrible for understanding the actual game. It's also not fun for the majority of players on the ice. We teach our Association kids that if they pass the puck, there's an opportunity to get it back. I've watched too many players make the right decisions, only to have a hot dog, Pavel Barber Wannabe try to go end-to-end through an entire team, lose the puck, and give up a goal against.
Pond hockey is because the kids get the touches they don't sometimes get in a game. hockey is the most fun for everyone, when everyone gets touches, and everyone gets touches when others know where they're going to be. That comes from setting up basic systems. I'm not advocating teaching 1-2-2 foosball forechecking to 10U players, but I do teach three different breakouts and we have a controlled zone entry philosophy (get the puck as deep as you need, spread out, and work together).
Our community has enough for exactly ONE 10U team, and that's only possible right now by double-rostering 4 mite players. This means we have a very wide range of players from AAA calibre, all the way down to one or two first-year skaters. When they leave here and begin to co-op with the other town, our kids stand out. they are stronger skaters, think the game faster, and generally speaking, are the better players on their respective tiered teams. In the last 15 years, our small club, which has less than 50 skaters from 10U to 6U, has produced on average 4 of the top 6 players yearly for the neighboring high school team, whose club is almost 70% larger than ours.
Unfortunately, most of these kids in the future will not even get an opportunity to play the game, as we'll be absorbed by our co-op in the next 10 years, and many of our parents will be unwilling to drive a 3, 4, or 5 year old an hour each day just to try hockey.
I love the majority of USAHockey's philosophies, and I'm a big believer in station-based practices, cross-ice hockey, and ADM as it stands. But this is not a "No Squirt Left behind" philosophy, this is a "Destruction of rural association" movement. It will lead to less participation outside of urban areas