CHL/NCAA

[OMG67]

All true. But you can do road trips where you visit clusters of teams where the clusters include teams from different divisions. Your Windsor, Sarnia, London trip, teams in two different divisions, could just as well be Windsor, Sarnia, Guelph, which would mean teams in two different conferences. I remember seeing the 67’s on a trip down our way where they stayed in Cambridge as a home base for the weekend and played Kitchener, Guelph, Owen Sound or Kitchener and Owen Sound, returned back to the hotel in Cambridge between games and played Oshawa on the way home. I’ve seen Belleville do the same thing using the same hotel in Cambridge as a home base. Using your format of visiting clusters, as long as that home base hotel can be centrally located between the three, all is good.

My reasoning for having an outpost team or teams in each of the four divisions is in fairness. I suppose you could do a division of the three northern teams plus Barrie and Owen Sound, call it the northern division, and then creat a division between London, Kitchener, Guelph, Brantford, and Brampton. Which division’s travel would you rather have?

Also, doing it the way I’ve done it, you have teams from all four divisions, who at some point play teams within their division along the 401 corridor. That matters when it comes to scouts wanting to get out to see your team play. Sure, scouts make it to all the buildings, but games more centrally, located get way more eyes than games in some of these outposts.

Rivalry games are a way to ensure reasonable travel for most teams that are subject to being outpost teams. That component will always be there.

The one area we hadn’t discussed about a 24 team league is schedule. If there are 12 teams per conference and 6 teams per division, if we keep it relatively balanced, we’d have 24 out of conference games (home and home), 24 opposing division games in conference (home and home x2) for a total of 48 games. That leaves only 4 games per team inter-division to get to 68 games. I don’t think there is an appetite to get to 78 games allowing each team to play 6 games against opponents int heir own division. IMO, since this conversation is a lot about travel and the league is all about lessening travel for the players to be able to concentrate on school, there needs to be some sort of unbalanced schedule.

Maybe opposing Conference games are alternating Home and Home over a two year period similar to how the WHL approaches their schedule. That gets us to 12 games vs opposing conference and 24 vs opposing division inter-conference for a total of 36 games outside division. 32 games remain in division. That is 6x vs each team in division plus an extra two against your rival team. That may go a long way towards reducing travel as well but may make out of division rivalry games more difficult.