Pride week-end and big news for MGHA

Happy Pride week-end, everyone! Just wanted to keep you updated on some exciting developments with the MGHA. We've got a new home, some new board members and our '08-'09 Season schedule has been set.

I hope you're having a fabulous summer and I look forward to seeing back out on the ice soon!

Michelle

MGHA's New Home

With an eye towards keeping player dues as low as possible, we have been exploring our options with the area ice rinks. After considering an exhaustive list of factors and carefully weighing the pros and cons of each rink, the members of Hockey Ops and the Board voted unanimously to go with Capitol Ice Arena for the '08-'09 season.

Advantages of Capitol include cheaper rates, priority scheduling, and a second full sheet of ice which we may need in the future if our league grows beyond 6 teams. On most other factors we looked at--such as distance, condition of the ice, size of locker rooms, condition of facilities etc--Capitol ranked at least as high as Madison Ice Arena, so the choice was clear. We're grateful to Madison Ice Arena for giving us a place to start out and grow. Now we're excited to see where this next phase takes us. If you have any questions about how or why we came to this decision, please talk to any of the members of the board or hockey ops.

CAPITOL ICE ARENA is located at 2616 Pleasant View Road in Middleton, WI. There are signs for the arena once you make a turn off of University Avenue. To view a map of the location please click here.

2008-2009 SEASON SCHEDULE
We will once again play all of our games on Sunday evenings and our ice times each week will be: 6:20, 7:30 and 8:40
We've also got some additional week-night team practices up our sleeves, but we're still finalizing the schedule on those. Watch for more details on that shortly.

Sept 21 & Sept 28 Pre-season skills sessions
Oct 5 Evaluations
Oct 12 First Team Practices
October 19-Feb 8 Regular Season games (no games Dec 21)
Feb 15 & Feb 22 Playoffs
March 1 Championship Games

Blades Against AIDS will be held as planned on Sat, Nov 8 from 7-9pm, but the location has been moved to Capitol Ice.

New Board Members, New Board Positions
The MGHA Board of Directors would like to extend our most sincere thanks and appreciation for all of the folks who expressed interest in serving on the board. Given the current workload (and the fabulous slate of nominees), the board of directors voted to expand the board to nine members (up from seven). That still left us with fewer slots to fill than we had excellent candidates. We're grateful that so many of you want to get involved and we hope to tap into that enthusiasm and creativity with other volunteer opportunities.
Two new positions have also been created, Vice-President and Co-Treasurer. Mike Meholic has agreed to step into the role of VP and the co-treasurer position will be filled at the next board meeting on August 3. Watch for a future newsletter with more details.

The current board members are as follows (our newest members indicated by an asterisk):

Michelle Watkins, President
Michael Meholic, Vice President

Dan Feeney, Secretary

Matt Jelinek, Treasurer

Bri Deyo
Tim Foster*

Mary Alice McGreevy

Steven Peterson*

Jenn Rotman*