Peters Hockey Ready to Faceoff Against 'Natural Rivals'

All while winning the Penguins Cup and state championships between 2000 and 2005, there was considerable talk, around the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League, that Peters Township would be moving up to play at the AAA level, since they had dominated teams in the AA Division.

Finally now, after , and , the Indians will finally get to play at the AAA level for the 2011-12 season, a move that is more than welcome for head coach Rick Tingle and the majority of the players who will return for another championship quest.

“We’ve been anticipating this happening for a long time,” said head coach Rick Tingle. “Most importantly, we want to play teams that are our natural rivals, such as Bethel Park, Upper St. Clair, Canon-McMillan and Mt. Lebanon. They are teams our student body has grown up competing against in every other sport, and it never made sense to be sitting down in AA, and playing teams all over the geographic area.”

When the PIHL was first formed by combining the old South Hills Interscholastic Hockey League, Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League and Lake Shore Interscholastic Hockey League, the league determined which division a school would play based on male high school student population.

In many cases, parity was achieved, but some schools, such as Peters Township, Meadville, Thomas Jefferson and Serra Catholic consistently dominated their divisions, and teams were eligible to “play up” in a higher division.

For Tingle, the move to AAA hockey couldn’t come soon enough.

“I honestly felt that we were going to get moved up two PIHL moves ago,” he said. “It didn’t happen then, and it didn’t happen again last year.

"Part of the reason last year, I guess, was that a lot of teams fell into the open division bracket, and brackets just kept getting smaller. A lot of that resulted in us having running clocks in a lot of our games because the teams we were facing were (not as strong)."

Tingle said that for instance, Upper St. Clair has a school district that is approximately the same size as Peters Township, but the high school is larger, resulting in their hockey team playing at the AAA level.

“We just felt it was time that we made the move to move up and face tougher competition, and schools, that are natural rivals to our players,” he said.

Tingle said he hasn’t heard from any players, as of yet, about their reaction to moving to a new level of competition, but guessed that they would also welcome the new challenge.

“There must be at least 15 guys who are returning to play again for Peters Township this year, and they all indicated that they wanted to play Triple-A hockey,” he said. “All the coaches were in support of the move, and it wasn’t a hard decision to make for us.”

Tingle said the move to AAA hockey won’t change the way the team prepares for the new season, but it will change the way the team prepares for individual games.

“In the past, we always knew what we were going to get when we played teams like West Allegheny or Latrobe,” he said. “Now, it will be a little different, because we’ll have to understand our opponents a little better, and it could be a game-day kind of thing, rather than season preparation.”

Throughout the course of last season, Peters Township scrimmaged AAA teams as they prepared for games especially in the AA playoffs, but although those sessions may have helped Peters players know their new competitors, Tingle said those kind of encounters will have little effect when they face them in actual games this season.

Tingle anticipates most of last year’s underclassmen will be returning, and expects they will be ready for the new level of competition that AAA hockey will bring.

“We’ve not had to go through a rebuilding program at the varsity level for quite some time, and I anticipate these guys will be ready to play when the season begins, but it is going to be a new challenge, so we’ll see,” he said.

“They’re going to be playing against a lot of the guys that they already know, and that’s going to be pretty exciting."