We understand there have been concerns about how we plan our games, and we're taking these concerns seriously. Our goal is to make sure our game schedule is balanced and healthy for everyone, and at the same time, we want to help our sport grow. Here's what we've been doing for the 2023-2024 season:

Making a Fair Schedule: We've been working hard to create a fair schedule for all the leagues. We want every game to matter. This year, we focused on delivering a balanced schedule for all leagues, ensuring that each game is meaningful. A balanced schedule means that each team plays an equal number of home and away games against each team. So, in larger (team count) leagues, there will be fewer games against one another, while smaller (team count) leagues will have more games against one another.

What We Considered: We used four important things to create the schedule:

• How many teams are in the league
• The most games a league should have
• The time from the start of the season to the finish, excluding playoffs and special weekends (total of 20 weekends from October 21 to March 3)
• Blackout weekends (based on Nova Scotia tournaments)

Helping Teams: We understand that playing games can be stressful, especially when they involve long trips in the winter. To make things easier, in planning the schedule we frontloaded any long travel to mitigate the amount of travel during the deep winter months.

Game Change Policy: We know there might be times when schedules clash. If that happens, we ask for your cooperation in following our HNS game change policy. This will help us make any necessary changes and keep things fair.

We hope this information helps you understand how we make our schedule. We wish you a successful and enjoyable season ahead. Thank you for your continued support.

Nova Scotia Female Hockey League Female Council