History of Cowichan Valley Minor Hockey Association
The Cowichan Valley Minor Hockey Association (CVMHA) was formed and registered in 1986. Prior to 1986, we had three separate Minor Hockey Associations that found it very difficult to compete with other island Associations. They tried taking turns carding teams to form a higher calibre of competitive teams, but due to a multitude of reasons, this didn’t turn out consistent teams.
A very hard working forward thinking group of community leaders got together and formed CVMHA as an amalgamated Association of the former Duncan, Fuller Lake and Kerry Park Associations. The former Associations became Clubs or Branches within the CVMHA. The amalgamation proved successful in making consistently stronger Competitive teams, but also had drawbacks with so many different executive committees under the CVMHA leadership. In 1996 another Club was created under CVMHA, and it was the Rep Club. The CVMHA Rep Club looked after all the Competitive teams, which enabled the CVMHA meetings to be shorter and more concerned with all hockey, rather than dealing with Rep issues. This seemed to smooth things out for a few years, but with all the executives at the Club level it was still quite challenging to organize Association business. Some Clubs were very good at understanding they were governed by CVMHA, and others always had a problem with it.
For many years a core group of CVMHA executive members felt the answer was to run CVMHA like every other Association in the Province, with one executive body and no Clubs or Branches. It took many years to see this happen, but finally in 2003 it was accomplished and CVMHA was truly one organization.
Since this time one of our former Branches doubled in members and in 2005 applied to BC Hockey to be recognized as its own stand-alone Association. Kerry Park Minor Hockey Association was granted its request by BC Hockey on April 1st, 2005. The 2005/2006 season found the newly formed Kerry Park Association successfully sending two teams to the Provincial Championships. CVMHA attributes Kerry Park’s success as an Association to our strong focus on development and wish them the best in their future.
CVMHA skates into the future as an “AAA” Association with a continued commitment to the development of all players. The 2005-2006 season had Cowichan Valley registering 719 players and recognized the importance of a strong foundation. We look to the future to grow bigger with more boys and girls playing the best game in the World and having fun learning it.