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posted 12/13/2013 The following are the timetable, procedures, and guidelines for scheduling and postseason event participation/seeding for the 2014 CONNY Lacrosse season.
TIMETABLE AND PROCEDURES
JANUARY 12, 2014
Due Date for Scheduling Contact Information and Team Profile and Competitive Tier Estimates – for every Senior, Junior, and Lightning team you anticipate entering in CONNY play.
Please use the Excel spreadsheet form found in the "ABOUT CONNY - CONNY DOCUMENTS" section of this website, accessible via the vertical tabs on the left hand margin of the home page.
Please submit the required information electronically to
for boys and to
for girls.
We will not keypunch data for 400 teams into the master spreadsheet. Use the form as provided so that compiling that spreadsheet will be a simple cut-and-paste process.
Games scheduled with teams that have not submitted these forms will not be accepted for posting and confirmation on CONNYlacrosse.org.
Instructions for completing the required form
—please read and follow carefully:
1. 2014 CONNY Team Profile Estimates: We realize that teams will not have been selected by early January. We do ask that members make good faith best estimates of their various teams’ composition by birth date and grade. Especially for the older age levels, this should be relatively easy based on 2013 rosters. Please fill in both birth date and grade information, regardless of how your team is organized. This information helps find appropriate match-ups during scheduling.
2. Competitive Tier Estimates: Please try to predict if your team will be in the top tier, middle tier, or bottom tier of all CONNY teams at the applicable age level. Please designate the tiers only as 1, 2, or 3, so that they can be sorted easily on the eventual master scheduling information spreadsheet. Use the “Comments” column for further qualification (e.g., “low Tier 1”) or other information.
3. 2014 CONNY Team Scheduling Contact Information: Add additional rows under each category/team as necessary to accommodate multiple contacts for one team. Please repeat the team name info if providing multiple contacts for the team. Otherwise, the form should be self-explanatory.
If you have any questions or comments about completing the form, please contact Trish Weber for girls (203-981-8409) or Jack Couch for boys (203-838-0232).
All the submitted Scheduling Contact Info and Team Profile and Competitive Tier Estimates will be compiled into a comprehensive scheduling information document and distributed to all designated scheduling contacts before the January 14, 2014 CONNY Board meeting.
Now until FEBRUARY 3 (Girls) or FEBRUARY 12 (Boys)—Preliminary Scheduling Period
Using the comprehensive scheduling information document, schedulers should seek to complete about two-thirds of their schedules before the Scheduling Scramble(s) in February.
Member programs are encouraged to form informal, ad hoc “forums” with similar programs and/or teams to initiate this preliminary scheduling. These forums should be based on geographic location, as well as traditional rivalries, team organization principles (i.e., age-based or grade-based teams), or any other considerations that seem appropriate to the members. Forums should meet early in the scheduling process to exchange information and accomplish core scheduling before the CONNY Scheduling Scrambles. If there is interest, time can be made available for this purpose before or after the January 14 CONNY Board meeting.
TUESDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 3—GIRLS SCHEDULING SCRAMBLE
This will be the time to fill in the remaining games on your schedules. There will be a brief CONNY Girls business meeting before the scramble.
TUESDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 12—BOYS SCHEDULING SCRAMBLE
This will be the time to fill in the remaining games on your schedules. There will be a brief CONNY Boys business meeting before the scramble.
FEBRUARY 15 to APRIL 1—Post and Confirm Games on CONNYlacrosse.org
Teams formed subsequent to the original scheduling process due to unanticipated late registrations must submit their Team Profile and Competitive Tier Estimates to the Secretary, VP-Communication, and VP-Boys League Play for boys and VP-Girls League Play for girls before they can post and confirm games on the CONNYlacrosse.org.
APRIL 1—Start of Regular Season
Dues must be paid to the Treasurer by this date, or before teams play games that they want to count for CONNY Tournaments seeding, All-Star allocation, etc.
MAY 9—Last Day to Declare Teams for the CONNY Tournaments.
Member programs must declare irrevocably which of their teams will participate in the CONNY Tournaments.
Along with that declaration, teams must submit CONNY Tournament rosters, actual team profiles based on those rosters, and final competitive tier estimates based on actual competitive experience. Use the same forms you used for your original profiles and tier estimates submitted in early January (attached). These profiles and estimates will be combined with game results for CONNY Tournaments pre-seeding and final bracket assignment.
Failure to submit rosters, actual team profiles and final tier estimates will exclude a team from CONNY postseason events.
At the time they declare teams for participation in 2014 CONNY postseason tournaments, member programs must send a check to cover each team’s event and officials’ fees. Last minute cancelations and no-shows at the CONNY Tournaments cause major dislocations for organizers and other teams. Scrambles to compensate for these cancellations too often result in ugly mismatches.
If a team withdraws after declaring for an event, or fails to show for the event, all fees will be forfeited and other penalties will be assessed against the team’s sponsoring program.
MAY TBD—CONNY Tournaments Pre-Seeding Meeting(s)
MAY 27, JUNE 2, & JUNE 9—CONNY Tournaments Seeding Nights (dates are subject to change; determined by final Tournaments schedule) Teams will receive their tournament schedules on or before the Thursday before they play.
SCHEDULING GUIDELINES AND CONSIDERATIONS
CONNY is an age-based league, in compliance with US Lacrosse Rules, but some member programs organize their teams around grade, rather than age. Most of these will be big programs that never changed from grade to age-based teams in 2008. These programs generally have enough players to field several single-grade teams at each level, so the maximum age spread of the players on each team is limited to the spread within a single grade, typically eighteen to twenty-four months. Smaller programs that cannot readily field single-grade teams often accomplish the same eighteen to twenty-four month age spread on the field by scheduling age-based opponents that share common twenty-four month birth windows (U15, U13, etc.).
Both CONNY Boys and CONNY Girls are sufficiently large and flexible to accommodate both age-based and grade-based organizing principles, while not changing the essence of the four-division, age-based format adopted in 2008. The following guidelines and requirements will help members schedule in this environment:
- Because it is likely that there won’t be enough pure grade-based boys or girls teams to fill out full schedules for all such teams, especially under-squads, grade-based teams are permitted to schedule games against age-appropriate age-based opponents. (That information will be on the comprehensive Team Profile and Competitive Tier Estimate scheduling information document distributed to the membership and all scheduling contacts in early January.) Such games must be against teams in their actual age division (as determined by the birthdate of their oldest player) to count for CONNY Tournaments qualification for either team. Some grade-based teams may want to schedule scrimmages against age-based teams in the age division determined by the ages of the preponderance of their players, but this category of contests will not count for CONNY Tournaments qualification for either team (this should not present a problem given the low 7-game qualification threshold). In scheduling these scrimmages, great care must be taken, using birth date profiles and other information, to avoid unsafe disparities or mismatches. The Sportsmanship Committee and the Scheduling and Systems Committee will monitor game results for any pattern of mismatches, especially in games and scrimmages between age-based and grade-based teams.
- In addition to age-based Tournaments brackets, again in 2014 CONNY boys and girls will provide separate brackets for 7th Grade Only and 5th Grade Only teams, assuming there is sufficient demand. In the likely event that members do not declare even multiples of four grade-based teams for each of these grades, excess single-grade teams will be placed into mixed brackets with age-based teams that match up appropriately with their birth-year profiles (e.g., a 7th grade team that is half U-15 eligible players will be placed in a U-15 bracket that matches up well with them by age). In these cases, the bracket seeding standard will be good matches, not age or grade orthodoxy.
- For scrimmages between age-based and grade-based teams, the CONNY Rules of Play governing the younger/lower grade team will be in effect. The most salient issues here for the boys will be the different rules governing stick lengths and the number of long poles allowed at each level and the different body contact rules for U13 Juniors and U11 Lightnings.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about any of these procedures and guidelines, don’t hesitate to contact Trish Weber for girls at
or 203-981-8409, or for boys, Jack Couch at
or 203-838-0232.
CONNY Executive Committee
