Saturday 17th November 2012 – Slough Jets Programme

Welcome to tonight’s match against the Guildford Flames. It’s our second meeting of the season with the Flames and this one is the first of a home and away weekend. That means that tonight is a league game only and tomorrow is the league/cup game to be played at their place.

Speaking of league and league cup games it appears there has been some confusion over the MK game we played at their place last week. The game, despite being the first of the season at their place, is shown in the official fixture list as a league game with the game at their place on December 16th being the league/cup game. There’s been some confusion on-line over that this week so I thought it best to clear it up.

Speaking of clearing up I’d like to apologise for the audio problems we suffered at the start of last weekend’s game. During the line-up the mid amp tripped out leaving the rest of the line ups sounding like they were being announced from underway and the national anthem also sounding like it was coming from deep in a swimming pool somewhere. I managed to diagnose the fault to a blown fuse in a plug and Pete changed that over and we were back to normal service quickly but it obviously wasn’t the best build up to a game we’ve ever had.

Last weekend was a good weekend for the Jets, with four points gained from two tough games. To shut-out the Lightning on Saturday to bag the first win for a while was a calculated performance. There was a little bit of luck on our side teamed with good skill, tough play and great team spirit and the final buzzer sounded with 2-0 on the scoreboard. On Sunday it was another good team performance to withstand a tough comeback from the Bees and out-do them in a 4-5 win! Not much sweeter than getting one over on the Bees especially when it completes a double win weekend.

Last week in these notes I mentioned that for a minority sport such as ice hockey positive exposure is priceless and to that end the league have come up with a great way of circulating information around involving the on-line gamesheet. Some people will already have noticed this on the EIHA website. It’s lined to Fixtures Live, the on-line system that’s used for player registration and is a web based app that enables the gamesheet to be completed on-line. It can be updated either live, at the end of the period or the end of the game, doesn’t need an active internet connection as it just needs a sync to the server before and after the game and it means that clubs can get access to the sheets much earlier than waiting for them to come back from away games and media can also get access to the information and data from each game in order to do their reports.

Richard (who does the sheet) and I spent an afternoon together before the season teaching ourselves how the system works and how to complete the gamesheet from the EIHA documentation sent out to me. It’s in an official testing phase at the moment, there are some teething troubles and the only way to work those out is by running it in parallel to the paper gamesheet but it’s certainly a giant step forward for the sport.

With such a powerful tool at the disposal of every club in this official testing phase it’s a shame that 60% of the league are not completing their sheets on-line as yet. While the completed on-line sheet isn’t official as yet it’s never likely to get through the testing phase with only 4 teams actively completing the games on the system which is very sad as it’s a powerful resource that will help all of us promote the sport.

Let’s get down to action tonight and hope for 60 minutes of edge of the seat action.

Enjoy the game

My team, your team, OUR TEAM

Mark