Define prime, early and late once
Prime time is an arena term before it is a fairness term. The Town of Oakville's ice allocation procedure splits the week into prime, shoulder and non-prime blocks by day and time, and allocates prime time in a stated priority order. Your association's policy should copy its arena's definition, then add its own two lines: when a slot counts as early and when it counts as late. By default the ice allocator calls a slot early if it starts before 07:00 and late if it starts at 20:30 or later; both are settings.
Fort Saskatchewan Minor Hockey's 2023 policy is a good model of the intent: it aims to share desirable and undesirable ice fairly among its U9 to U18 teams, and names early mornings, late evenings and out of town rinks as the undesirable kind. Cole Harbour Bel Ayr rotates its five weekend practices that start between 6 and 7 am among nine competitive teams, so most get one every second weekend.
Measure shares, not slots
Counting prime slots is misleading when teams have different targets. A team with three practices a week and one in prime time has a third of its ice in prime; a team with one practice a week in prime has all of it. The fair comparison is the share of each team's own ice that is prime, within its division. For early and late slots the count is what families feel, so count those.
Worked example: the sample with and without evening out
The invented sample association was allocated twice from the same ice and teams, once with prime time and early and late slots evened out within each division (the default) and once with both switched off.
| Measure | Evened out | Not evened out |
|---|---|---|
| U13 prime share, lowest to highest team | 60% to 67% | 60% to 100% |
| U9 prime share, lowest to highest team | 67% to 67% | 50% to 83% |
| U13 and U15 early and late slots per team | 4 to 4 | 0 to 7 |
| Broken rules | 0 | 0 |
With evening out on, the U13 gap in prime share is 7 points instead of 40, and the U9 gap is 0 points instead of 33. The early and late slots spread from 4 to 4 per team instead of 0 to 7. The teams are 4 hours short of their targets in total with evening out on and 4 hours with it off, so evening out cost no hours overall.
Common mistakes
- Comparing prime slots instead of prime shares, so teams with more ice look luckier than they are.
- Rotating the 6 am slots across the whole association instead of within each division.
- Inventing a prime time definition that differs from the arena's invoice.
- Fixing prime time by hand after the allocation and breaking a curfew or a coach pair in the process.
See also how to allocate practice ice fairly and the season checklist.