The IIHF and Tournament Details

Merry Christmas Eve!  At the Connolly family dinner tonight I was asked a lot of questions about my trip, the IIHF and the tournament itself so I figured another blog post was in order!  The IIHF is the governing body of ice hockey internationally.  There are 68 member nations, and of those countries 38 sponsor women's hockey.  The IIHF ranks the countries each year then, based on the rankings, splits them into 5 different divisions with each division hosting a World Championship tournament.  The winner of each tournament moves up a division and the last place team moves down to a lower division.  Each Olympic year, the top 6 teams ranked teams get an automatic birth into the Olympics and the teams in the lower divisions have to play qualifiers for the last two Olympic spots.  Last spring I worked the Division 2 World Championship, so the winner of my tournament moved up to Division 1 and the loser dropped to Division 3.  Historically, the US and Canada have dominated the competition, however the IIHF is investing a lot of money in women's hockey to try to improve the competitive balance.  One thing they have done to help is added a U18 Championship Series for women.  The first U18 World Championship took place in 2008 and since then they have added a 2nd division. This year they added a qualification tournament for that 2nd division because so many nations have started to sponsor teams.  It is great to see the sport growing and hopefully, as the other nations start to develop their younger players, they will begin to close the gap between the US and Canada.

So that said, I'm going to the IIHF U18 Women's World Championship in Zlin & Prerov, Czech Republic.  This is the top division U18 Women's tournament.  The countries participating are the USA, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland and Russia.  Those countries are divided into two divisions for the preliminary rounds.  Group A games are taking place in Zlin and include the USA, Czech, Sweden and Russia.  Group B, which includes Canada, Finland, Germany and Switzerland are playing their preliminary round games in Prerov.  The teams were grouped based on the world rankings from the last several tournaments.  The winner of each group will receive a bye to the semifinals.  2nd place from pool A will play 3rd place from pool B and vice versa for the other spot in the semifinals.  The 4th place teams from each pool will move to the relegation round.  Here they play a best of 3 series, with the winner staying in the top division and the loser dropping from the top division.  The US and Canada are expected to dominate, however rest of the teams are all very close so those games should be very competitive.  More information on the tournament, including schedules, articles, pictures and stats can be found on the following websites:

IIHF Tournament Page - http://www.iihf.com/channels1112/ww18/statistics.html
Official Tournament Site - http://www.u18wwc2012.com/eng/index.asp

Time for me to go to bed, I need to go to sleep so Santa can visit! :-) Next entry I'll talk about my travel plans and other tournament details.  Goodnight and Merry Christmas!