Timbit Parent Meeting

Dear Parents,

Welcome to the NBMHA Timbit Hockey for Beginners Program!

In the attached handout we ask that you attend a parent meeting. This meeting will be held upstairs at West Ferris Arena on Tuesday, October 8^th, 2019 at 7pm. At this meeting we will share some important information with regards to our program. Then we will be handing out your child’s schedule, sweater & hockey socks. In the past we have been able to conduct our meeting, hand out the sweaters, socks and schedules and get this done in approximately 1 hour.

Why we ask you or a designate to attend:

We have a limited number of volunteers who freely commit their time organizing and running our program. Our goal is to make every effort to ensure the Timbit Hockey for Beginners program is fun and rewarding for your child (and you). We need your participation to help us do this.

At this meeting we may be handing out 180 hockey sweaters and sets of socks along with the schedules for the season. We want to ensure we are ready to go for our start date which is Wednesday, October 16^th. Between the 3 sessions we offer in a 2 hour period, we will be introducing 180 children to the ice portion of our program. That will be the sole focus of our instructors the first night as well as being stressful for all involved.

As volunteers, during the winter we will also commit to being on the ice with your children on Wednesdays and those early Saturday mornings which in total work out to be approximately 32 ice sessions. This means our instructors will spend 64 hours on the ice this season. Each ice session for our instructors is 2 hours in duration.

The one area that is time consuming but is really never noticed is the administrative time involved in organizing our program. Between the time registration ends and the night of our parent meeting there will be many hours spent inputting information on spread sheets and organizing our teams.

For your part we ask that you (or send someone in your place) attend the parent meeting. If you are not able to attend, you will be required to make alternative arrangements to pick up your child’s sweater, socks and schedule. Which means you will need to come to our home to pick them up. We now have 8 grandchildren in North Bay & Ottawa to brag about and elderly parents who need our attention. We would prefer to focus our attention on them rather than wait at home in the evening so we can hand out sweaters, socks and schedules.

Immediately after our parent meeting we have the Thanksgiving weekend then our program starts. We will be in Ottawa that weekend enjoying time with our grandchildren and not available. We ask for your understanding as it is not our intent to disappoint any of our young hockey players. Please attend the meeting or send someone in your place!

Changes to our Program: (with regards to parents coming on the ice to assist with coaching) In years past we operated as a independent hockey school using and private insurance carrier that gave us flexibility to allow parents on the ice to assist with the coaching and other on ice activities. We now come under the governance of Hockey Canada. Their policies require anyone wishing to volunteer to come on the ice and assist us with the on ice activities (which we welcome and need) will now need to obtain the following Hockey Canada requirement which include:

• a vulnerable sector police check
• respect in sport – training module – taken on line
• transgender awareness – training Module – taken on line

Yours in Hockey

Coach Scott