Even with two teams on ice, Big Macs producing winners

(Photo: Anthony Tonkovich captains Canon-McMillan's "AAA" team. John Heller/Post-Gazette.)

"In the 2010-11 season, Canon-McMillan became the first PIHL program to field two freshman teams.

But the question remained -- what would happen when all those youngsters got a few years older?

"We probably had 22 players in the ninth-grade alone," Canon-McMillan hockey association president Bruce Ferguson said.

To accommodate that, the PIHL announced in the summer of 2011 that PIHL teams could have multiple junior varsity squads."