Another month, another record. Buoyed by an unexpected glut of visitors from a link on Yahoo’s Puck Daddy, September is poised to destroy our previous one-month visitor and pageview totals. This is tremendously exciting and I’m humbled to the core, but I also want our new readers to recognize that there is much more to this site than the half-dozen posts on the main page.

One of the oldest, most popular, and fastest-growing parts of Backyard-Hockey.com is our North American Pond Hockey Tournament listing. My goal when I created the listing was twofold: I wanted hockey players and fans to have a central location to find information on every pond hockey tournament in existence, and I wanted to help these tournaments gain exposure and grow in their communities, thus giving pond hockey some mainstream traction. My site statistics coupled with feedback from tournament directors and hockey players alike indicate we’ve succeeded in that venture. So for those of you new to the site (or the RSS feed, or the e-mail list, or for our new Tweeps or Facebookers), take a look at the pond hockey list and see if there’s anything near you. Sign up, take in a game, get involved. You won’t be disappointed.

For you faithful readers and repeat visitors, please note the four sizable changes made to the listing this week:

• The US Pond Hockey Championships have set a date. The tournament featured in the Pond Hockey documentary will host its 2011 tournament on January 21–23, 2011.
• The dates for the first-ever Lake Champlain Pond Hockey Classic have been moved from February 25–27 to February 18–20, 2011.
• The tentative dates that were listed for the Vermont Pond Hockey Championships have also changed. Instead of February, the event will now take place January 29–30, 2011.
• We’ve also added a new event: the 2011 1883 Black Ice Pond Hockey Classic will take place in Concord, New Hampshire, January 28–30, 2011.

Pond hockey is growing very fast and new tournaments are sprouting up all over the place. You can help by spreading the word in your corner of the world by re-Tweeting this or sharing it on any of the social networks below. And as always, if you know of a tournament not listed, please let us know using our contact page.