Tiering is the process we go through at OC every year to determine the level at which our players should compete.  In the bad old days, all our house league players were thrown into a single pot, and played together on teams without regard to the skill and ability level of the players.   This led to very unbalanced teams and posed real difficulties for development of kids at every level.

Bytown introduced tiering to establish teams for kids at different skill levels and stages of development at each age division.  By placing kids on A, B and C teams, we can ensure that the range of skills on a team is much narrower, and that kids are playing with and against other kids of like ability.  Tiering has been overwhelmingly positive from a development and team balance perspective.

There is a negative, however, and that is the tendency to equate tiering with “trying out.”  It isn’t.  Every kid registered at OC is going to play on a team, and all are playing house league hockey.  Tiering is just a process of sorting kids into categories by skill and stage of development.   Some anxiety is probably unavoidable, but we urge you as parents to do what you can to take the pressure off.  Explain that the tiering process is not a tryout, and that the aim of it is to ensure that kids have the best time possible playing at the right level.  If a child figures out that his or her parent has something invested in “making” the A team, that kid is going to feel anxious about the process, and experience tiering as a failure if s/he ends up on a B team. 

As for the process, each convener will work a bit differently, but typically a convener will have a group of parents (generally those who have coached in the past, and those who have identified themselves as coaches for the coming season) on the ice throughout the September sessions.  The convener and the coach group will assess the players over a few weeks, and begin to form preliminary player groups.  The groups get refined, and some 3 weeks in or so, the outlines of teams will be made.   Player evaluation has an unavoidable subjective element, and certainly there is sometimes little to choose between the kids at the bottom of one tier and at the top of the one below.  The first important thing to remember is that all the decisions are made with the input of the coaching group, after many hours of observation (and subsequent hours of discussion).  The second important thing to remember is that this group of volunteers is likely much better placed than you are to make an objective assessment of your child’s ability.