[Sylvanfan]

I can think of two guys, Curtis Glencross and Mark Recchi who were both Bantam house league players, and ended up getting to the NHL. Granted in today's world where parents spend 350 grand to get their kids prepared to be NHL machines...I don't know if this still works.

I was a bad low level hockey player as a kid. I liked the hitting aspect of hockey, as much as anyone. I mean the games were pretty much slug fests where all you did was try to kill other guys throwing big hits because it's not like there was much skill at that level. But when I was midget aged and my only option to play was in a non hitting league....suddenly my skill level was forced to improve a fair bit because without hitting there wasn't much point playing the game if you couldn't stick handle, shoot, or pass.

We actually went to a couple of full hitting tournaments and our team ended up placing pretty well because rather than play the hit and kill everything game...we scored more goals than the other team and none of our guys got hurt because we had no clue how to hit against the players who did it all the time. Truthfully I improved more as a player between the ages of 16-19 and that was without any practice time.