On December 23, 2016, I put together a survey of users from /r/HockeyPlayers.
The survey was hugely successful! I ended up getting 95 survey responses. I have summarized the results in this post.
The survey was built with two aims:
- Understand what kind of hockey players were regular users.
- Understand how much demand there was for additional resources surrounding hockey systems for beer league players.
Thank you to everyone for sharing your information and participating in helping me build this resource!
Let’s talk about what we learned about the /r/HockeyPlayers community.
But first….
Updates to this site will be shared on a new Facebook Page. Check it out:
https://www.facebook.com/beerleaguetips/
Responses
Responses came almost entirely from the US and Canada.
Several states were more prominent than others.
The people responding came from a specific demographic. Usually, middle-aged and male. There were no responses from anyone under 18, nor over 55. I plan to play hockey until I’m 75. I don’t know about you. 🙂
Nothing here is unexpected. I think this is probably a mix of the demographics of Reddit combined with the demographics of beginner/intermediate hockey players.
Speaking about that…
Hockey Skills
We asked respondents to rate their hockey skills from “New” to “Competitive”. New players have never played, competitive players had a career in professional or elite U20 teams.
A very uniform spread of beginner and intermediate players dominates the responses with only a few other types of players interested in this material.
To better understand how people play, we asked what type of hockey they have played in their life, ranging from youth leagues to beer leagues, to drop-in and shinny and whether they have coached teams themselves.
Surprisingly, 5% of respondents have never played hockey (but may be interested in learning). At a future date, I may include outdoor shinny or “pond hockey”. I know everyone is fond of the cold wind and nostalgia from hockey at its roots.
Positioning
Another topic I was interested in was positions played by beer league players.
As we can see, this is an expected distribution. On a typical beer league 14 man roster, there are 6 wingers, 3 centers and 4 defenseman and a goalie.
I was curious, however, how flexible people were. Here is a breakdown of those who chose only one position, vs those who chose multiple positions:
Again, that’s about what I expected, but it’s interesting to see.
Also, I was curious how the position breakdown shifted by skill level.
Here, we can see that beginners lean toward playing wing, as expected. Intermediate players play a lot more defense. Advanced and competitive players tend to play a bit of everything, likely because they will tend to have higher skill levels than their beer league teammates.
And, of course, who can forget.
