Chilliwack Minor Hockey Hires Brad Rihela for Craftsman Development Plan – Agassiz Harrison Observer

COVID had a devastating impact on youth sports in 2020, but it also provided an opportunity for the Chilliwack Minor Hockey team.

President Lee McCaw and the CMHA board have time to evaluate what they do and how they do it, and one of their targets is player development.

“Player development, coach development, and Community Relations are arguably the three biggest things we offer in terms of the fees charged to our members,” McCaw said. “At the end of the year, they expect fun, apparently, but they also expect to get better and develop properly.

“We as a government considered it important to have a paid position to oversee this.”

Enter Brad Rihela, assistant head coach and general manager of BCHL’s Chilliwack Chiefs, and a guy as connected to player development as possible.

“For many years, he did an amazing job of leading players and coaches in Aldergrove, where he grew up on purpose,” McCaw said. “We were able to knock him out of Aldergrove under contract and bring him here. With all of today’s competition, with all these different places you can play, the quality development is huge and Brad is going to be a huge part of it.”

Rihela’s Competence Development Group employs an interesting list of names, including Bobby Henderson.

Until recently, Henderson, BCHL’s Langley Rivermen hockey manager, brings a lot of experience to the team and is a hired coach on CMHA’s bantam A1 team.

“It’s a very important part of rep hockey these days in getting neutral non-senior coaches,” McCaw noted.

Troy Stordy has been heavily involved in the Mission Minor Hockey program, leads the Mission Kings spring hockey program, and owns the HockeyHQ training center in Abbotsford.

“He’s a great guy, very educated in cutting-edge development,” McCaw said.

Other notable names include Wes Mcleod, Graeme Strukoff and Kevin Zarillo.

“All of these guys are in high demand in the Fraser Valley area, and we were able to pull them all together and allow them to support small-scale hockey,” McCaw said. “Guys like Clarke Wismer, Clayton Krahn and Jeff Dods are great and they are all still part of your program, but it was important to bring in some people that many of our members are going to develop in their own time.”

Team members are assigned to specific divisions, and they draw up an all-season development plan for the coaches. McCaw said future new coaches have complete training plans ready in case they need them and want to use them.

“It is phenomenal that we will be able to provide such a high level of development without costing our members anything extra in addition to lower hockey fees, which will actually be reduced by around eight per cent in 2021-22,” he said. “All of this is part of a unified long-term plan. We went through all the COVID timeouts through our policies, policies and manual and found that we did not have a long-term plan. So we developed a five-year plan that will build our development back to the elite level in Chilliwack for house and agent players. For everyone. “

Learn more online at chilliwackminorhockey.com

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