The Charlestown Mite A team began the season in the Fall of 2013 with big changes. Its former league, the Greater Boston Youth Hockey League (GBYHL) had recently folded. The GBYHL’s former teams, which were primarily comprised of teams from Boston’s larger neighborhoods, disbursed to find new leagues. Many of those teams found a new home in the Valley Hockey League, one of the largest youth hockey leagues in the nation. The Mite teams alone are comprised of over 70 teams from Boston, Metro West, North Shore, Merrimack Valley and New Hampshire.
Being new to the league, the Charlestown Mite A team was placed in the middle of the pack for the “Parity Round”, which is a series of seven games at the beginning of the season that determined the level of play for the teams’ regular season. After outscoring their opponents 134 to 12, the team was placed at the Mite Elite level, where it would face big suburban programs and old cross-town rivals. As the season progressed, this team with a small roster would go on to skate stride-for-stride with opponents and find a way to win.
During the season, the team experienced the highs of beating Dorchester in sudden death overtime to win the Mayor’s Cup. It also experienced the lows of a heartbreaking defeat to a former GBYHL rival, South Boston, in the finals of Charlestown’s Bryan McGonagle Tournament.
As the regular season came to a close, the team earned a first seed in the playoffs by winning the Valley League’s National Mite Elite Division. The team advanced to the playoff finals where it would face the same South Boston team that had handed them defeat in the McGonagle Tournament.
In the playoff finals, the team built a 3 – 0 lead in the first period. Aggressive pursuit of the puck and excellent defense would eventually lead to a 12 – 2 Charlestown victory. After shaking hands and receiving their trophies, both teams showed great sportsmanship by joining for a combined team photo, celebrating the fact that two “City” teams and old Boston rivals had made it to the championship game in their first year of a much larger league.