Congratulations to all the AGHF teams advancing to the Atlantic Amateur Hockey Association (AAHA) Tier II District Girls Championships this weekend!

14U: NJ Bandits
14U: Princeton Tiger Lilies
16U: NJ Bandits
16U: Princeton Tiger Lilies
19U: York Devils

Since 1992, Princeton Tiger Lilies has fielded competitive Tier I and Tier II teams at various age groups. They currently have at least one team at every age group, 8U-19U, with multiple teams at 12U-16U. They are members of the National Hockey League and the Atlantic Girls Hockey Federation. 

The Bandits are a Tier II Youth Hockey Program located in New Jersey. The focus is on player development, both on and off the ice, the importance of sportsmanship and teamwork, strong competition, and growing the game of girls hockey. Coaches and staff encourage the players to develop confidence and competence in fundamental skills, in a safe, competitive environment.

York Devils Girls hockey is a Tier II program located in Pennsylvania. The mission of the York Ice Hockey Club is to develop well-rounded young men and women through high-quality hockey instruction, physical conditioning, team play, and good sportsmanship.

Congratulations to our 2023 AGHF Playoffs Weekend 2 All Tournament Teams! These teams showcase top performers from the past weekend.

10U

MAKENNA HETRICK #14 Saugerties Fillies
TAYLOR TAHAN #55 PTL
RYLEIGH MACSWEENEY #15 NJ Bandits
MELANIA MACHNOWSKY #4 PTL
ETTA FELLOWS #12 Saugerties Fillies
ARIANA LIU #6 Saugerties Fillies

12U

LAUREN LETTS #2 PTL Black
SARA CALDICOTT #44 MYHA
HANNA GUNLYCKE #90 St. James
AVERY BAILE #16 PTL Black
ALYSSA MARKS #11 MYHA
ISABELLA BRUNO #11 PTL Black

Congratulations to all our AGHF Playoffs Weekend 2 Champions and Runner Ups!!

10U Champion: Saugerties Fillies
10U Runner Up: Princeton Tiger Lilies
12U Champion: Princeton Tiger Lilies
12U Runner Up: MYHA

Congratulations to our 2023 AGHF Playoffs Weekend 1 All Tournament Teams! These teams showcase top performers from the past weekend.

14U Diamond

F – GIANNA BUTTO #25 NJ Bandits
F – LYLA PICKER #93 PTL Black
F – LEAH EICHHORN #57 South Pittsburgh Rebellion
D – ANA DONELLY #4 NJ Bandits
D – SAMANTHA DANDY #66 PTL Black
G – KATE RUBINSTEIN #88 NJ Bandits

14U Platinum

F – MARGARET CARR #66 Jr Flyers
F – MADYN BARNETT #76 Reston Raiders
F – ANDI LEFKOWITZ #4 NY Islanders
D – NATALIE MUSSER #12 Jr Flyers
D – ZAARA YUSUFI #11 Reston Raiders
G – CASEE MITCHELL #79 Jr Flyers

16U Diamond

F – HANNAH ROSENHECK #16 NJ Bandits
F – ISABEL BRIGHT #27 PTL Orange
F – GABRIELA ZANGARI #20 PTL Black
D – JENNA KIRCH #26 NJ Bandits
D – ABIGAEL GALLAGHER #14 PTL Orange
G – HARPER KEENAN #40 NJ Bandits

16U Platinum

F – SAMANTHA SCOTT #91 Maryland Jr Black Bears
F – EMMA HILES #71 York Devils
F – CHLOE ZIEGLER #29 North Jersey Lady Kings
D – EMMA WACKOWSKI #45 Maryland Jr Black Bears
D – HAYLEE STONEKING #26 York Devils
G – ANNABELLE SIMMERMAN #55 Maryland Jr Black Bears

19U

F – LACI NELSON #5 York Devils
F – HOPE MENICHILLO #48 Rockets Hockey Club
F – JACQUELINE MCGEE #18 NY Islanders
D – KATHRYN KOTCHISH #8 York Devils
D – PAYTON JACOBUS #21 Rockets Hockey Club
G – BRIDGET BAYLES #31 York Devils

Congratulations to all our AGHF Playoffs Weekend 1 Champions and Runner Ups!!

14U Diamond Champion: NJ Bandits
14U Diamond Runner Up: Princeton Tiger Lilies
14U Platinum Champion: Jr. Flyers
14U Platinum Runner Up: Reston Raiders
16U Diamond Champion: NJ Bandits
16U Diamond Runner Up: Princeton Tiger Lilies
16U Platinum Champion: Maryland Jr. Black Bears
16U Platinum Runner Up: York Devils
19U Champion: York Devils
19U Runner Up: Rockets

Final KRACH Rankings and Playoff Qualifiers have been finalized for all AGHF divisions. Will your team be the first to raise the AGHF Banner and call yourselves CHAMPIONS? Click here to view Playoff Qualifiers for both Playoff weekends. The final schedule for this upcoming weekend will be made available on the website by tomorrow.

Our Atlantic Girls Selects team were unstoppable at the PeeWee Quebec International Hockey Tournament. They took on teams from all over the world and made it the first ever Girls Division PeeWee Quebec Finals after beating the Mauricie Stars 4-3 in the Semi Finals. The team fell short in the Championship game against Durham West Lightning but still brought home a 2nd place trophy for the AGHF.

Alongside their wins, players were exposed to the rich history and traditions of the game and had the opportunity to be fully immersed in French-Canadian culture and customs. The girls attended a Remparts game, went to the aquarium, attended the Quebec Carnaval, skated on a frozen pond, traded pins, and more.

We couldn’t be more proud of our team for all their accomplishments throughout the week! We thank the coaches, parents, and manager for making this week possible.

hat is it? – KRACH is short for “Ken’s Rating for American College Hockey.” Ken is Ken Butler, a statistician, and the mathematical model he used is known as the Bradley-Terry Rating System.

  1. The KRACH rating system is an attempt to combine the performance of each team with the strength of the opposition against which that performance was achieved, and to summarize the result as one number, a “rating”, for each team. The higher the rating, the better the team.
  2. KRACH accounts for strength-of-schedule (SOS) as it ranks the teams.
  3. KRACH is calculated purely from the results(win/loss/tie) and does not use goals scored or goal differential like myhockeyrankings.
  4. Overtime wins count as wins.

Why we use it rather than points? – KRACH ratings are used instead of traditional points for the following reason:

  1. Teams play an unbalanced schedule, teams will not play all the teams in teams’ age division
    • Teams that play a more difficult schedule would be unfairly punished in the traditional points-based standings
    • KRACH does not put greater emphasis on blowing out teams like myhockeyrankings
  2. The THF offers 2 season structures, full-season and partial season.  Using KRACH rather than points earned will allow for fair rankings such that teams playing fewer games are fairly measured within their division

What is the process for the Federations – The KRACH algorithm is written in python and consists of a data organization routine and an iterative strength of schedule solver.

  1. The algorithm takes the Team win loss data from an excel file output by the GameSheet online scoring platform used to store game data. 
  2. This data is then organized by division using tags provided by GameSheet. 
  3. This divisional data is then organized into pairwise comparisons based on wins and losses to feed into the solver. 
  4. The pairwise team input can be visualized as a matrix with each time represented as a row and wins against other teams in the columns.  
 Team ATeam BTeam CTeam D
Team A–201
Team B3–50
Team C03–1
Team D403–

The solver utilizes a Bradley-Terry model to solve for rankings (P) using the paired comparisons. Pairwise means that given a pair of teams i and j drawn from a population P the algorithm estimates the probability that team i will win over team j:

To get to this probability an iterative algorithm with “regularization scheme” and pairwise team win records are used.  Per the CHN a logistic regression is used as the solver of the iterative algorithm. The regularization scheme used is an ‘alpha value,’ a regularization scheme so that the solver does not go to infinity when teams have zero wins. The alpha value is 0.85 for every team input as a win against a ‘Dummy Team’. This is because you cannot have zero as the numerator.

The solver then initiates a ranking of 1 for every team, then solves the following equation for each team. The ellipses (…) at the end of the equation represents the sub formula for Team A (Tm A) against Teams C and D.

P Tm A = Total Wins Tm A / ( Sum (  (Losses Tm A vs. Tm B) / (P Tm A + P Tm B), …)

The new P values for each team are calculated using the existing P values as shown above for Team A. These values replace the 1s used to initiate the algorithm. The same calculations are conducted on the new P values for the next iteration of the algorithm. This is repeated 200 times or until the difference of P values between iterations is less than 0.00001. The output (P) is then scaled by 10,000 to make the results all over 1.  The iterative nature of the algorithm allows for the strength of schedule to be taken into account automatically without any initial rankings. Thus, no initial rankings are made by hand and no favoritism is possible. Strength of schedule is included in the calculated P value by including the P values of all teams played while calculating each team.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley%E2%80%93Terry_model

https://www.collegehockeynews.com/info/?d=krach

https://github.com/bjlkeng/Bradley-Terry-Model/blob/master/update_model.py

The THF, AHF, and AGHF each strive to provide the best youth hockey experience in the country. In response to an inquiry from an AHF family, on Friday February 3rd senior management responsible for scheduling began reviewing the data feed from GameSheet to the KRACH program and continued investigating this throughout the weekend. By Sunday February 5th, they discovered that the score report used to calculate the weekly rankings had a faulty data feed. Rather than recording the win/loss result from shootouts, KRACH recorded a tie for both the winning and losing team. Therefore, the KRACH ratings and rankings that were posted throughout the season were wrong, particularly impacting teams that had a relatively high percentage of shootouts. Black Bear Sports Group, which controls the Federations, apologies for not identifying this flaw earlier in the season and recognizes the disappointment faced by those players, families and coaches who were most impacted by learning so late that their relative ranking was not reliable, especially as relates to playoff placement.


On Tuesday February 7th, we communicated this issue with the boards of the three Federations and had calls with the Hockey Directors of the participating clubs. We chose to make the necessary adjustment to the calculation and then published the correct KRACH ratings the next day on Wednesday February 8th. Please be assured that the rankings are now accurate, and the correct teams are in the right playoff brackets. Yesterday morning, we explored with various Hockey Directors the idea of making changes to the Championship brackets, including expanding the size and/or changing the format. The consensus was that this would create significant logistical challenges for a greater number of families given the ripple effects of changing bracket sizes and playoff locations.


We have followed closely the feedback on social media, in particular the AHF discussion group on Facebook. Below are a few points to highlight:

  1. Again, we wish we had learned of this glitch in the data feed earlier and are sorry for the
    confusion it caused. Moreover, we should have sent to the families this notification clarifying
    what happened when the new rankings were published on Wednesday.
  2. We want to be responsive to our families and players. Based upon your recent feedback
    relating to this issue, we plan to revisit the championship bracket size and format going
    forward.
  3. We will revisit the treatment of tie games, including specifically the appropriateness of
    shootouts.
  4. We believe the presence of partial season teams in our leagues makes us stronger, allowing
    for better competition and higher MyHockeyRankings for our teams. This is especially
    important for our AAA and AA teams.
  5. Many questions have been raised about the reliability of KRACH. We want to reassure you
    that the formula, which was created by a third-party Python programmer is accurate. We will
    be publishing the KRACH formula later this week. Again, the error was in the data feed from
    GameSheet and not in the formula itself.
  6. We offered to the Hockey Directors our willingness to get on a call with any team that has
    been impacted or with anyone who has any further questions.

The mission of the Federations was to create an unbalanced schedule that maximizes competition for those interested in the highest levels of hockey and minimizes travel for those looking for a balance of competition and travel. We believe the short season teams help us form the best hockey leagues in America. The unbalanced schedule along with our spring parity event minimize blowout games. Our results speak for themselves as our blowout games are a fraction of those experienced in other local leagues. We hope this provides context to help you understand that the ranking issue was simply a data feed error, not a flaw in our league operating model.


We truly appreciate the passion of our families and coaches. You commit so much to this great sport, and it is our duty to listen to your concerns. Your feedback makes us better and we are truly grateful for your support.

For the week ending on February 5th, the Atlantic Girls Hockey Federation rankings are in. KRACH is a team’s win/loss ratio multiplied by strength of schedule. You can view all rankings here.

The teams that are in first in each division are Saugerties Fillies (10U), Princeton Tiger Lilies Black (12U), Princeton Tiger Lilies Black (14U Diamond), Philadelphia Jr Flyers Sakers (14U Platinum), NJ Bandits (16U Diamond), York Lady Devils (16U Platinum) and York Lady Devils (19U).

The final rankings are determined when the last game of the regular season is played.