Finnish Junior Hockey

Hello readers!

In this post, I am going to tell you what hockey is like in my home country Finland, and I am going to tell you what kind of differences I have noticed between Finnish and North American hockey. I want to start with the biggest difference which is that Finland does not have any type of school teams. You have to play in a junior team. You always play with players your age unless you are good enough to play with older players. There are five leagues in Finland and each league is a different skill level. The top league is called SM-Sarja which has the best teams in the whole country. It is like the tier one league in Finland. At the beginning of the season, there are sixteen teams that qualify for the best league. Only ten teams make that better league and the rest of the teams form another league called the lower SM-Sarja. That league has 10 on it also. The tier three league called Mestis qualifies three of the best teams in that league to lower SM-Sarja. There are three groups in that league and three of the best teams in each group go to tier two and the best ten teams after that form the league and the worst teams get demoted to tier four which is called Suomi-Sarja. That league has the same concept as Mestis has.

You play AA and AAA until your sixteen years old and after that, you start to play in those leagues I just told you about. You play in those leagues all the way up to Junior A. U16 is known as Junior C. There are players that are sixteen years old and younger. U17 is known as Junior B2. There are players that are seventeen years old or younger. U18 is known as Junior B. Junior B teams are formed of players from two different age groups like this season there are players in the same team that are born in the years 2002 and 2003. After U18 comes U20 which is known as Junior A and the oldest players there are around twenty-one years old but it usually has players that are around seventeen to nineteen years old. Thank you for taking the time to read this post and I will see you next time with a new blog post.