WHY CO-OP OUR GIRL SKATERS?
In our co-op, the girls pay their fees to their home association and all of their fund raising obligations are to their home rink. This is one way to get enough girls at each appropriate age level without having multiple home rink obligations for families with multiple skaters, which is often the case especially with girl skaters. It was our intention to have each Storm girl be able to skate at their home rink for at least two years as they come up through the Storm program. When we started our co-op the U10 girls skated out of the Wausau rink and they seemed to fit in good there, because of the bigger size of the Everest rink we learned though experience that Everest would be best suited for our older U14 Storm girls, and that left the Mosinee rink as the home rink for the U12 Storm girls. As you will read below, you will see that things change and each season brings new challenges. But that’s how we grow and we anticipate more of these good growing pains in the future!
2003/04 HOCKEY SEASON
This was our first attempt to have a co-op team with the girls from Everest, Mosinee, and Wausau. The Mosinee association fielded a U12 team and won 4th place at State. Several girls from the Wausau & Everest associations and a few Mosinee girls fielded a U10 co-op team and we were called the “Mighty Angles”. All U10 practices and home games were played out of the Wausau Rink. The U10 Mighty Angles went to State and won 7th place.
2004/05 HOCKEY SEASON
This season we had a lot more girls jump on the co-op bandwagon and we had enough girls to support teams at the U10, U12, and U14 levels. The Everest, Mosinee, and Wausau associations all agreed to house one team while again having the girls pay their fees and serve their fund raising obligations to their home rink. We were searching for a new name and some how we all agreed upon Central Wisconsin Storm. We also wanted to combine the colors from all three associations into our logo and therefore we came up with the tri-color logo above on the left for our Storm youth teams. We decided to have each association house one team and Wausau remained the home rink for the U10 team, Mosinee was the home rink for the U14 team, and Everest was the home rink for the U12 team. For simplicity, the U12’s and U14’s shared their practice ice and had one practice each week at the Mosinee rink and one practice each week at the Everest rink. We ended our season by sending all of our Storm youth teams to State Competition with the following results: U10’s won 6th place; U12’s won 7th place; U14’s won the Consolation Trophy.
A core group of parents started meeting at least once a week with the intentions of putting together a W.I.A.A. Varsity Girls Hockey Team as a co-op team with girls from Everest, Mosinee, and Wausau. We struggled through many hurdles by continued to take one step at a time to reach our goal of a Varsity Girls Hockey team. In the spring of 2005 all three School Boards approved our W.I.A.A. Varsity Girls and one of the stipulations was for us that we fund 100% of the Girls Varsity Hockey team for at least the first two years and we agreed. We moved forward and developed the “Central Wisconsin Girls High School Hockey Booster Club” as a 501c3 charitable organization and the fundraising started.
2005/06 HOCKEY SEASON
This was our inaugural year for our W.I.A.A. Varsity Storm team along with our U10, U12, & U14 Youth Storm teams. Mosinee Hockey Association donated 2 years of ice time to the Varsity girls for exchange of 100 hours of concession stand work. This was very valuable for the development of the Girls Varsity team. The booster club agreed that since free ice is something that is not offered very often it would be best if we used all the free ice we could get and therefore all of the Varsity practices and home games were held at the Mosinee rink. We tried to incorporate the school colors for all 4 high schools in our logo. Despite many efforts, we couldn’t get the logo to look appealing. Our coaching staff got together and made the decision to pick a team color that was not represented by any of the four high schools. As the saying goes, “When we put together Green, Purple, Red, and Blue we got Maroon” and the team color was born. We also developed the Varsity logo, which is shown on the top right side of this letter.
This season we also made the decision to make Everest the home rink for the U14 Storm girls because of the larger rink size and to move the U12 Storm girls to Mosinee rink while Wausau remained the home rink for the U10 team. We ended our season by sending all of our Storm youth teams to State Competition with the following results: U10’s won 2nd place; U12’s won 7th place; U14’s won 2nd place in overtime!
2006/07 HOCKEY SEASON
This season we still had our U10, U12, U14, and Varsity teams and the season was pretty much structured the same as the 2005/06 season with only a few exceptions. Even though we were still receiving free ice time at the Mosinee rink, the decision was made to have some of the Varsity practices at the Wausau rink. We ended our season again by sending all three Youth Storm teams to State Competition and our U10 Storm team won our first State Championship! Our U12 Storm team won 2nd place in the 3rd overtime of the final game at State and our U14 Storm team won 2nd place at State.
2007/08 HOCKEY SEASON
This season we still had our U10, U12, U14, and Varsity teams. We started our 3rd season with our Storm Varsity team and our free ice in Mosinee was over. This season our Varsity practices were distributed pretty evenly between the Everest, Mosinee, and Wausau rinks and we had 3 home games at each rink. Our youth teams also had a few changes this season with the major change being that the U12 and U14 practices were not consistently held together and the U12’s used all three rinks for their practices. The U10’s remained the same with all of their practices and home games at the Wausau rink, our U12’s continued to have Mosinee as their home rink for games and the U14’s continued to have Everest as their home rink for their home games.
Another big change this season was that the Booster Club decided to sponsor a Storm Hockey website (www.stormgirlshockey.com) that all Storm teams can use. Since the Storm girls have ice scheduled at multiple rinks, the website was a huge help with our ice schedules.
We ended our season by sending ALL of our Storm teams to state. “Yes We Can” was the motto that our Varsity girls had for winning our play-off and the State Championship games, and “YES WE DID”! Our Varsity Storm team is the 2008 W.I.A.A. State Champion! And to sweeten things even more, the next weekend our U12 Storm girls won their first State Championship title! Our U14 Storm Girls won 3rd place at State and our U10 girls won 6th place at State. We owe a HUGE thank you for all of the support from everyone for giving us this opportunity to be involved is such an incredible way to shape our girls lives!
We look forward to getting more girls involved in hockey and to help make hockey a positive life experience for everyone involved!
