Why Beer League Teams Implode

In this episode of The Beer Leaguer Podcast, we're breaking down seven of the most common reasons beer league hockey teams fall apart—and surprisingly few of them have much to do with what happens on the ice.

We talk about what happens when one person becomes responsible for registration, jerseys, money, scheduling and every other job nobody notices until that person stops doing it. We also talk about the dreaded attendance death spiral, why both tiny rosters and gigantic rosters can create.

The biggest theme running through all seven? Communication. Most of these problems aren't unavoidable disasters. Teams can usually see them coming—but only if players are willing to talk about them before a minor annoyance turns into the reason half the roster leaves.

Check out past episodes, Beer Leaguer social channels, and the Beer Leaguer shop at https://thebeerleaguer.com.

Links

• Why You Should be the Glue Guy
• 10 Things Beer League Teams Don't Warn You About
• Starting a Beer League Team? Don't Make These Mistakes

Transcript

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The Beer Leaguer 0:00

Year one is the honeymoon phase. Everyone just hangs out after games. No one cares about wins and losses. It's just about having fun. Year two, some people change their jobs. Maybe people have to miss games because their kids have things going on all of a sudden. Someone gets hurt. And well, the kind of quiet guy from the first year, he starts to turn into the kind of weird kind of quiet guy that no one talks to. Somewhere then in between years three and four, the team hits that fork in the road. Are you staying together for the next 10 years as a group? Or are you going to be relying on reserve players to finish out the season? Over the years, I've seen many beer league teams come and go, including my own, reform into new teams, split. All kinds of stuff happens. But why? Why does that happen? In this episode of the Beer League podcast, we're going to talk about the seven most common ways I've seen beer league teams fall apart. Number one, captain burnout. I've talked about it in other videos about being captain, the good parts, the tough parts about it. And this doesn't necessarily have to be the actual person that wears the C on their jerseys. This is just you have somebody that's doing too much, somebody that's kind of doing everything for the team, and they get burned out with it. I mean, it's barely supposed to be fun. It's something to do, you know, in your off time away from work. And some people, it starts becoming a job and it stops being fun. And if you have one person that's kind of carrying the load for your whole team, you know, registering your team, getting jerseys, all the different stuff that needs to go on for a season. Uh finances, that's always a big deal. If you have one person that's handling all that and they get burned out from it, so they stop, well, then the team kind of falls apart around

— #1: Captain burnout

The Beer Leaguer 2:00

that. So that is something to definitely look out for. Um, this is one of those things that you can totally prevent. Uh, usually the people, if you have someone that is doing everything, they might not feel like they can delegate stuff to other people. So this is a time for the rest of the team to be like, hey, we don't want you to get burned out doing this. What can we do to help out? And hopefully that can help prevent this from happening. But that that is definitely something that I see happen, and it happens kind of a lot uh with all different levels of beer league teams, too, and not just new ones, but older ones as well. Uh, because you never know when that's gonna happen. But it tends to happen to people if you have one person running everything. So something to be aware of, something to watch out for, and something that I think is pretty preventable from happening. Number two, this is

— #2: The attendance death spiral

The Beer Leaguer 2:51

the other the other big one that I see a lot of times, and I'm gonna call this the attendance death spiral. So, what a lot of teams wind up getting into this weird situation of that they don't know how to handle, and this is especially for newer teams, uh, because this tends to kind of work itself out over time, but especially newer teams, either the it's all newer players or the team itself is like a new collection of people. Finding a proper roster size and how to management. Some teams want to have a roster that's just like 11 skaters. You know, they everybody's gonna show up for every game. Maybe one person misses, that's it. They want 11 skaters, so that way it's never too many people for one game. Uh, everybody might have to pay a little bit more if you're doing a like team fee instead of individual fees for it, but that's fine because they just want to get the ice time. So people are okay with that. What can happen there though is if you have, you know, two or three people are on vacation at the same time, or what I see happen a lot is people tend to uh in beer leagues play with people that they know from other hockey-related things. So you'll have like a kid's travel tournament for a certain weekend, and all of a sudden this team doesn't have four people because they're away at the travel tournament. And if you only have, say, 11 skaters and four of them are gone, well, now you're down to seven skaters for a game. And if this is something that happens regularly, it can cause problems. On the opposite end of that, you have people that say, hey, get as many people rostered as possible, make it as cheap as possible for everybody. We don't care if there's extra skaters out there. And then you wind up with 20 skaters showing up for a game. So then people are getting one, maybe two shifts a period, which isn't fun either. So it's really finding that balance between not just what your team wants, but what your team realistically does. You know, if you have a bunch of people that miss a lot of time regularly, you might want to have a larger roster. If you have most of your people show up to every game, you can probably go with a smaller roster. So it's finding that sweet spot in there of what people want, how much you know you kind of want to pay for a season. Again, if you're doing like a team, a team fee, and how many skaters for a game is a good amount versus too many versus how many games is that? You know, maybe it's a trade-off of we do we have a lot of skaters rostered, but most games we still only have 10 people show up. But hey, twice a year we're probably gonna have 17 or 18, and you just kind of deal with it versus the other way of we're gonna have a very small roster. Most games, you know, we only have 10 or 11 skaters show up, but a couple weeks we might have six. So it's finding that balance, which is different for every team because this is very much a personal preference thing, but finding that and finding that sweet spot. And really the only way to find that is to talk to people. Your team needs to kind of know where everybody's at. Um, after a year or two of being around, you probably know what kind of availability people have and keeping an open dialogue about that type of availability for it. We can also have things like reserve players and sub players come in and help out. But again, that can fall into weird stuff because maybe some people, you know, don't want to sub as much or want to sub a lot, or they won't sub if they can't make, you know, can't play in half the games or something like that. So it's really this is something that is preventable, but you have to talk about it. And most people tend to not think about this until it causes problems. So this is something that is very, very much preventable, but it needs to be discussed with everyone on the team. And then when people come into the team, let them know kind of how it works and what's going on and what the situation is, so no one's taken

— #3: The problem player

The Beer Leaguer 6:44

by surprise. Number three, the problem player. All right, this is kind of not kind of, this is definitely the trickiest one of these. You have different types of problem players out there. And generally, most kind of issues people have playing in Beer League is a lot of stuff gets left on the ice. It's fine, not a big deal. But you do have the people out there that can kind of ruin the fun for everybody. So you have the tryhards, you know, the people that think every game is game seven of the Stanley Cup, even though they're playing at 11 o'clock at night with a bunch of people over 50. You know, that's that's not fun. Uh, the people that are they are always, you know, bitching to the refs, bitching to their teammates, bitching to the other team about everything. Every little thing. You know, why wasn't this a penalty? Why was this a penalty? That should have been a shot. Why didn't you call icing on this? Every single little thing is a huge problem, and they're making it everybody else's problem. Not fun for people. Then you have some people out there that just they're dangerous out there. You have people that are either playing way out of their depths and should not be playing the level of hockey that they're playing at, or people that what is the nice way to put this? Uh regularly. Let me think of the of the nice way to put this. You have people that regularly show up in a state of mind where they are not able to properly keep themselves and the others on the ice as safe as they should be playing hockey. All these very, very different things, very, very different situations, all need to be handled very, very differently. But they're all issues. All of these things are things that can start off very small and then blow up and really divide a team and make teams fall apart and split apart from this type of thing. So this is something that I think everybody kind of needs to be aware of that can happen on a team and watch out for. And if you see stuff like this, say something to people. Don't let people get away with this kind of stuff early on, thinking it's going to go away. These are the type of things that compound as time goes on. And so, again, this is something where people need to talk. And this doesn't have to be a huge team discussion. This can be someone just pulling a person aside, you know, before or after a game, and maybe during, but I would recommend before or after a game and saying something. You know, this is a good time if you know you can talk to somebody in the parking lot, either as they're leaving or as you're hanging out in the parking lot with the team, and say something about this and bring it up to people so they know. You know, some people just they they don't realize how uh how aggressive or how different they can be on the ice versus off the ice. And they just kind of need to be pointed out to them with it. Uh, but this is one of those things that if you see a a little a little bit of it somewhere, remember that and notice it and do what you can to prevent it from getting bigger. With players like this, one player can really blow up a team uh pretty easily uh with doing some stupid stuff. Like I said, this is definitely one of the trickier things on how to handle it because it's dealing with people and whatever else is going on with them. And usually this is stuff that has nothing to do with hockey going on that is bleeding over into hockey. So tread lightly on it, be careful with it, but this is something that definitely should get addressed at some point before it becomes a big problem. And also, this is not something that needs to be left to a person that's the captain or even somebody that wears an A on their jersey to handle. This is not necessarily something for that person to have to handle. Uh just putting that out there that a lot of times people kind of fall onto this idea that uh just because someone's the captain that they need to handle all this stuff, even though they might not be the most well-equipped person to handle these types of situations. So don't just think that they'll handle it or that they should. You know, find somebody on the team that you can talk to to tell them about this. You know, talk to other people on the team about this. I'm sure other people notice the same kind of things, and figure out who the best person to talk to this person is about whatever it is. I mean, maybe this is someone that you can bring it up in the locker room and kind of put it out there, or maybe it's not. But like I said, one of the trickiest things, probably the hardest thing to deal with on a hockey team, especially if you're trying to keep a team from falling apart, is if you have a problem player. But it is really a very important thing to keep in mind if you do want to keep her team together for a decent amount of time. Just going to take a quick break here in the middle of this episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Beer Leaguer podcast. And please subscribe if you haven't subscribed already to the show and you just found this out in the wild. And I want to remind you, go check out thebeerleaguer.com over there, all the past episodes, all sorts of other social media stuff on there. And the Beer League shop is open and available on the website. Hoodies, t-shirts, hats, stuff like that. If you want anything with the beer leaguer logo on it, you can get it from there as

— #4: The skill split

The Beer Leaguer 12:30

well. Go check it out. Thanks a lot. Or uh, this is something I see happen a lot with beginner teams as they kind of grow up a couple years in, is just kind of the skill split on teams really starts to get a big gap in there. Uh, so what you end up happening is either better players come in, you know, people recruit friends or just other people that they find to try and help their team out. And those better players start playing together, like playing together, don't necessarily like playing with some of the not as skilled players on the team and want to, you know, split the team up, uh, which sometimes can lead to just two teams totally coming out of that, no problem. Sometimes it can lead to one team basically dropping a couple players and moving up or down. And then you have some players that are just kind of left out in the lurch uh for it. Uh, you can also have this with, like I said, beginner teams where you have a lot of like players that have different backgrounds. So you'll have people that maybe played hockey in high school but haven't played in 10, 15, 20 years. And after a year or two of playing somewhat regularly, they're kind of getting back in shape and getting back in the swing of things, and their kind of skill level is going up and up and up and up. Whereas these other players that, you know, maybe their first game was their first time on the ice, their skill level is still super low and very slowly creeping up or almost leveling off. And again, there's a big can be a big split there with players. Some players start playing, and by year two, they are showing up to you know practices and skill clinics, and they're going to open ice and all kinds of different things to try and get better and better and better. And other players are very happy just once a week playing. That's it. They're out there for a skate, really nothing more. All these things, none of them right or wrong. It's just a thing that happens. And like I said, especially with a lot of beginner teams, it tends to happen after a couple years. And that skill gap can make the better players really resent playing with the not as good players and want to move up. And it can also make the players that aren't as good not have as much fun because maybe they're not touching the puck as much because the better players always have it. And so they want to either stay where they're at or move down or get rid of those other players. And this is one of those things, again, reiterate through a lot of this stuff, talking to the team and figuring stuff out. Uh, the worst thing that you can do with this, and this is what you want to avoid, if a team splits because the good players want to go play up higher, or the the less good players want to, you know, play lower or stay where they're at or something like that. The worst thing to do in that situation is basically screw over a couple handful of players by not giving them ample time to find another team and going, hey, yeah, I know the season starts uh in you know a week. We're gonna, you know, the team's moving up, we're dropping you four guys. That's something unfortunate I see happen every couple of years. And those couple players are then left scrambling. I'm like, well, I want to play, but now I got to find a team. But almost everybody probably has their rosters filled, so I don't know where I can play. I mean, the opposite can be true too, where they drop a couple of the better players, or you know, maybe the league says, hey, these two guys way too good, can't play, and then they're left without a team. So that's what you want to avoid. Uh the team splitting because of skill level, it happens. Uh, you know, not necessarily a good or bad thing, but leaving people in in a lurch without having a team because this is all done last minute. Uh, that sucks. That sucks for everybody. So that's what you want to try and avoid with this, is not having that happen. If this thing that happens over the course of a year, you realize this is happening, and you go, hey, well, next year this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna split the team, or these couple players are gonna be looking for a new team. That's something you can work out. So that's where you want to be, not the people that leave somebody screwed and can't find a place to play.

— #5: Life gets in the way

The Beer Leaguer 16:46

Number five, just life. I mean, you guys heard me talk about this in my one of my 10 things videos. You know, you have 1030 games, can wreck people's sleep really bad, so people can't handle that. Um, league fees, you know, playing hockey is not cheap. So that extra expense can put a lot of stress on people or on families for things. Uh, you know, you have some guys that have no care about leaving their hockey gear to either sit and ferment in the back of their car that their whole family uses and everyone hates it, or people that just lay their gear out, you know, in like the living room for a night because they have no place else to put it and people get pissed about it. Uh having people that maybe did no kind of activity before all of a sudden jump in and try and play hockey and go a little too much and just constantly getting hurt, all this kind of stuff. All this kind of stuff can add up to having people just quit and leave and not show up to games anymore. And this is, you know, this is the kind of thing you have to watch out for throughout the season if you have people that are slowly dropping off in their attendance uh because of this kind of stuff and find out what's going on. You know, it could be a super simple thing as hey, the next couple weeks is super busy at work and I'm not gonna be able to make any games that start after 9.30 uh for a little while. Or something, you know, my kid just picked up some sport. So if we have games on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I won't be there. Stuff like that, that can happen, and that's like a temporary thing. But it might also be just all this stuff kind of compounding with someone, or like I said in the other video, compounding with them and maybe whoever they're living with, causing them to not be able to play. So finding out what that kind of stuff is, finding out if this is a permanent thing or if this is a temporary thing. So that way you can know kind of going forward what to expect of this person and what's going on. Because you can very easily wind up with the end of the season, four or five players that are kind of in this limbo state, and and you don't know, like, are they gonna be playing full-time next year? Can they? Are they not? Are they, you know, would they want to play part-time? Are they only gonna be able to make like four or five games? What's going on? So finding out the reasons for this stuff really goes a long way to understanding where these people are gonna be. And and just as a quick note, generally in Beer League, nobody warms up good. You should warm up a little bit more. Trust me, that extra two minutes of stretching, of actual stretching, will probably help you out. And you know, not just taking four slap shots as soon as you get the ice and then saying you're good, a little stretch will help out on some of this stuff. So number six. The room goes quiet. All right, I'm really just gonna refer to the glue guy episode that I did a little while ago. I think that explains this whole situation really well. Um really the idea of this is just the bulk of your team is just shows up, puts on their gear, plays, leaves, that's it. Nothing else. And then you wonder why your team fell apart.

— #6: The room goes quiet and the “Glue Guy” episode

The Beer Leaguer 20:16

Yeah. Go go check out that episode, All About the Glue Guy. That I think that explains it. Alright, number seven.

— #7: Locker-room boundaries, cliques and team culture

The Beer Leaguer 20:24

This is probably after the problem player issue, the trickiest thing to navigate on a team. And this is not drawing proper lines for what is acceptable in the locker room. Uh, I do mention this in a previous episode where I talk about starting a team and this being something you should really discuss, but a lot of teams don't. And it kind of comes to bite them later on. And what I'm talking about here is not lines like your lineup, but what things are okay to talk about and not okay to talk about in like a team context. And I think the two biggest things in there that can cause division among people and cause issues is shocking, I know, politics, and also I don't know a better way to put it besides the level of kind of ribbing that players give each other. Now, this is not to say that everybody needs to be on the same page of all this stuff. You do not need to be. But if everyone is everyone is on the same page, great, talk about this stuff. I'm sure then no line needs to be long drawn on certain things. But it's finding out the level of comfort in the room with the players that are there. And not making people feel super uncomfortable for things, whether that be like I said, politics is a big one and ribbing is a big one. Uh some people cannot kind of take a joke. And not in a bad way. Not there's people that get super pissed about it. There's some people that you can joke with and they won't say anything and they really internalize it and it and it's not good. And then there's, I'd say the vast majority of people can take most well-natured uh ribbing about their play and stuff like that without a big deal. But it's finding where those lines are for and every team's different. Finding that comfort level and keeping things there, not letting things get out of hand and not letting things cross the line, or when they do cross the line, people knowing, like, oh, oh, okay, hey, you know, either sorry I said that or didn't mean that, or walking it back for things. But finding those and setting those lines out there really go a long way for keeping your locker room a nice place, keeping people friendly, and getting teammates to not hate each other. That I've seen that happen where you'll have someone bring up something in a locker room like that, thinking that everyone's gonna be, you know, have a good laugh with it. And you just have a couple people that just go, you know what, I can't play with this person anymore. Like that, that's it. I'm done. I can't play with this person because of this. So this can really tear apart a team pretty quickly. So setting those levels with stuff, and it doesn't have to be something necessarily spoken out. Maybe it does, depends on the team. But getting that set at some point early on, establishing that, and then when people come in, making sure they understand that stuff really, really goes a long way to again, we talk about it all the time on all these different shows, setting a good locker room culture, which keeps your team from falling apart. One of the things that can happen when you have people that have very differing views on these types of things, is you can very easily turn your team into a group of small clicks. And there's almost nothing worse in the locker room than having a bunch of different little clicks that only really talk and interact with each other and don't like cross-interact on the team. That is a super toxic environment that just kind of snowballs itself into making your team eventually fall apart. So set those lines,

Wrap-Up

The Beer Leaguer 24:13

guys. So there you go. The seven most common ways I have seen beer league teams fall apart. I think all of them are preventable. Uh, they're all ones that you can at least see coming, I think, and try and take steps to prevent them from happening or hopefully lessening their impact for you and your team. Almost none of them have to do with stuff on the ice. Maybe I should say a lot about beer league. So anyone can work on fixing these things. Like I said, this is not something that, like your team captain or the person that's been on the team longest, or the oldest player in the room, or anything like that, has to be the one to deal with. This is something, these are things that anybody can try and prevent and anybody can recognize and try and do something about. So I would love to hear from you. Have you ever been on a team that has fallen apart from any of these things, or maybe something different that caused enough issues to make your team implode? Love to hear about it. Drop me a note, drop a comment down below, or head on over to thebeerleaguer.com and send me a note or voicemail from there. Thanks a lot for listening, and as always, catch you in the next one.