The U.S. select women’s hockey team, which includes Gophers assistant coach Natalie Darwitz, will scrimmage a lot of high school boys’ hockey teams this season starting Nov. 21-22.

Coach Tom Osiecki’s U.S. team has been invited to participate in the Buffalo Jamboree that weekend. There will be varsity scrimmages all day and night on one of the rinks there.

 Some of the most watched undoubtedly will involve the U.S. team.

On the first day, Friday, Nov. 21, the U.S. team will scrimmage St. Cloud Tech at 4:30 p.m. and Blaine at 7 p.m. On the second day, the U.S. will play Wayzata at 4:30 p.m. and Buffalo at 7 p.m.

Osiecki, a longtime boys’ and girls’ hockey coach at Burnsville High School, also is lining up scrimmages with other boys’ team such as Burnsville — for obvious reasons, Eagan — Darwitz’s school, Edina — where Jenny Potter lives, and Minnetonka.

The U.S. team has been playing in a no-checking men’s league on Wednesday at the Super Rink, so this is familar ground for them.

Games with boys’ high school teams also will not allow checking, Osiecki said, but he expects there will still be contact. He said his players can be rough and tough; they will fight for pucks in the corners.

Osiecki said he is unclear exactly what the high school league will allow at scrimmages involving his U.S. women’s team and boys’ high school teams, i.e. referees, scores being kept on the scoreboard, tickets being sold, etc.

 He obviously does not want any of the teams to break any rules. … The obvious problem is high school teams are limited to how many games they can play. And if a scrimmage has too many of the elements of a game, a team can’t call it a scrimmage. The high school league may be more lenient, though, for scrimmages with a U.S. team, Osiecki said.

Hard to say. I remember the great softball brouhaha four or five years ago where a handful of high school teams had to forfeit games because the scrimmages they played in Florida one spring were actually games in the high school league’s eyes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.