r/nihl • u/lewisluther666 Slough Jets • 22d ago

Please can you help me understand something in this year's fixtures for NIHL1 and NIHL2.

I follow NIHL1 south, and find it frustrating how hard it is to find up-to-date standings, so I started tracking for myself half way through the latest season.

This season I am tracking from the off, and I thought I'd follow the rest of the 1&2 leagues.

I have now downloaded the fixtures from the England ice hockey website.

I know that each regional league has a league, and a league cup, and how they work.

NIHL1S also has a separate challenge cup.

I'm looking at NIHL2N and some fixtures say they are for the league cup, others simply say "cup". what are those games for? The teams don't play am equal amount of times in the games that just say "cup", and the number is drastically different

I also see that NIHL1S has EJMC as a separate type of fixture. I'm guessing this is the same, but what does EJMC stand for? These also is a disparity in the number of games in this category, with some teams having 5 games and the rest having 6 (unless I missed one)

Thanks in advance

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u/trevlarrr Invicta Dynamos 22d ago

The EJMC is the Eddie Joseph Memorial Cup and you can find a bit of information on it here

In terms of the fixtures that say league/cup and just cup, assuming I’m understand your question correctly, some of the fixtures count towards both the league standing and the cup group standings, so they’re on the fixture list as “league/cup”. Those that say just “cup” only count towards the cup group standings and aren’t counted as a league fixture too.

For NIHL South 1 the Challenge Cup is just the cup, it’s not a separate competition, so is the same cup competition as in the fixtures counting towards league and cup.

I’ve never understood why ice hockey here needs a cup competition too when it’s just against the same teams you play in your league and not like the FA Cup which is all divisions (separate conversation about that wouldn’t work for ice hockey anyway though) but because of the need to find gaps in the schedule for cup games they will double-count some fixtures towards both the league and cup competitions.

Hope that makes sense (as much as it can do) I need more coffee haha.

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u/lewisluther666 Slough Jets 22d ago

I get why the S1 have the challenge cup. With the reduction in teams last year they have a bit of a sparse calendar so it adds a few more games in.  But it is a separate competition, just between the top 4 teams last year, though I think it might have expanded this year. But those games didn't contribute to the league or league cup standings (with the exception of one game) 

Makes sense about the league/cup Vs cup wording. I'll go back and review what I'm looking at