This is the inaugural season for this new and exciting league. The primary purpose of the league is to provide a focus and opportunity for growth and development for competitive girl’s hockey teams.

The unique concept that we will be using this year, builds on the already established successes of the events that have been building over the past 3 years. The league will be played “inside” the existing tournament formats that the Anaheim Lady Ducks, San Jose Jr. Sharks and Arizona Selects have established since 2002. This season will mark the fourth time that each of these associations has held an all-girls events and the Colorado Selects will round out the schedule with the addition of a fourth event in November.

The intent is to assist with the growth of competitive girls’ hockey in the western states and also attract top teams from other parts of United States and North America. Each of the tournaments will be run independently and all league teams will get an opportunity to play other teams which have entered the individual tournaments. This is an improvement over some formats where you end up playing the same teams over and over. The existing tournaments will be run as in the past, attracting teams form all over, but if a leaque member plays another league member, it will "count" in the standings.  We already have interest both for the individual tournaments and the league, from returning teams from back east as well as Canada and Alaska. There are some obvious attractions, as we all know, to playing hockey  in the Western States, with the weather in many of our cities, being a main one. The level of competition has increased dramatically over the past decade and the college recruiters are also starting to take notice.

The structure of the league for this first year will be fairly open. The requirement to join is quite simple and an Intent to Register form is located on the site under Forms. This website will be used to keep the statistics of all the teams who register and for those who have participated in three of the events, they will qualify for the League Championship, which will be held during the Arizona Selects event  taking place in Scottsdale, AZ during Presidents Day weekend in February, 2007.

Check the site often as it will be updated regularly. There will be links to all participating associations, tournament information and a master schedule calendar as well as the team statistics. Please feel free to contact us with any suggestions or comments.

See you all in Anaheim September 22 for our first event!

Rick Van Fleet

WGEHL Commissioner