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Goffman announces SHC Playoff Schedule
SHC's Mike Goffman announced today that the playoff schedule for April has been set and has optimistically been posted on this website. All games will be played at Songjiang Ice Palace and will be spread over 3 weekends. Says Goffman 'We are hoping that the China indoor cricket team does not make a last minute decision to come to Songjiang to practice and steal our rink'. Assuming nothing bad happens, here are the highlights according to Mike:
1) Playoffs start with 2 round robin pools of 4 teams. Pool A will be made up of 1st, 4th, 5th and FDth place (sic) in league standings. Pool B will be 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th place in league standings. Each team will play 3 games withing their pool. These games will be spread over the weekends of April 6/7 and April 13/14 at our regular Songjiang evening time slots. Each team will have only 1 double header weekend over this time period.
2) There will be 4 final games on Championship day... April 21st.... in the AFTERNOON. The first game will be the 'participant' medal game featuring last place pool A vs last place pool B. The next game will be the bronze game (3rd vs 3rd) and so on to the gold medal championship spectacular (1st vs 1st in case you haven't spotted the pattern). These games will start at 2pm and go until 8pm. That's 6 hours for 4 games so we will either have extended length championship games or some sort of dog & pony show between games. Goffman has hinted at some Minnesota style fun involving pigs, grease and skidoos but would not elaborate. Says Goffman 'The intention is to make this a fan and family friendly event with some sort of food and fun to keep everyone at the rink. In Minnesota we call this the Four F's - food, fun family and fans' (inbreeding optional). Apparently volunteers will be needed for this event.
In a more somber mood Mr Goffman finally added 'Some SHC members will be disappointed that we are not going to Nanjing. It should be known that the SHC executive tried to make a weekend in Nanjing work but there were too many obstacles. The main obstacle was that while Nanjing worked great for a 6 team playoff, it just did not work very well for an 8 team playoff. We would have had to choose between playing only 2 games each spread over 2 nights in NJ or keep everyone there until late Sunday afternoon. On top of this Nanjing raised their rates to us by well over 100%, train tickets can no longer be bought in bulk, and the league poll earlier this year said players overwhelmingly preferred Songjiang.
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