Mental ramblings of a geek dad

I’m sorry to rant, but I think this is completely stupid. Next fall goalie gear will need to be of the new “NHL-based” specs, which means the goalie gear owned by local hockey associations and parents will be “illegal” on the ice for games. To be fair to Hockey Quebec, they might be following Hockey Canada.

I understand and appreciate the idea behind normalizing gear to standards but they’re doing this for all levels of play. So novice (7 to 9 year old players) and atom (9 to 11 year old players) will need new gear. Since parents and associations (unlike some believe) are not made of money and therefore this rule should apply to players starting at a certain level of play (pee-wee or bantam) since they have a more serious outlook on the game.

What this will likely cause is a shortage of goalies, where gear will be less abundant and cash will be an issue. Most importantly, this will discourage parents from dressing up their kids as goalies, hurt the sport which is in decline and will not help anybody play any better at all.