My child has done a number of winter training programs, including the 3 mentioned here - HP Elite, Golden Boot and Arlington. Depending on the skill level of your player, any of the 3 may be worth doing but of the 3,HP is the best option imho; it’s indoors so minimal chance of cancellations, high quality group of players, decent class size and price is competitive. Arlington is outdoors (the ones we did) so weather can be an issue; they do divide classes between rec and travel so it’s helps to big differences in the players’ levels, but if your kid is a high lvl, then there can still a big gap even on the travel side; the groups were pretty big. Golden Boot had nice programs but did not draw as high a level of player. The younger your kid, the higher I would recommend them.

I love the fact that Spirit is making their DA players subsidize the professional team. Why not lower the fee and let the player families decide whether they want season tickets? I can't count how many times I've heard that Spirit will subsidize the DA when it's actually the other way around. Next they'll require each DA player to board a professional player for at least 2 months and call it "special access to the professional team".

And given the cost for travel (DA national events, lots of local travel), I'd bet the costs will be closer to $8k

Since the term was used to describe me, I feel it's only appropriately that I claim the name for posterity,

And I do not see what's wrong with wanting to postpone a decision until you have as much relevant information as you can get, such as you'll be coaching your kid, how good will her teammates be, and if the program will cost significantly more. On the last point, Spirit's emails say the cost will be "competitive" with similarly situated programs so we'll see.