from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

I’ve certainly had enough of the lobby group calling for an all-out ban on fighting, or immediate suspensions for any hit to the head whether intentional or not. The faction that would bubble wrap every adult and child who pulls on a hockey sweater, and should perhaps choose a more genteel sport. As Bryan Marchment once said, “Go play tennis.”

Fighting is, in fact, not banned in CIS hockey. There are still a few scraps in the CIS-21 fighting majors recorded in 266 Ontario University Athletics conference games, plus playoffs last season-but, beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing today, it has been legislated out of the day-to-day. The sanctions simply make that violent release too costly. “We still felt last year that we had too many major penalties. So we increased the sanctions,” said Bryan Crawford, executive director of the OUA.

The rules are virtually unilateral through the Ontario, Atlantic and Canada West conferences. If you fight in a CIS game you receive a game misconduct and a one-game suspension-the equivalent of a red card in soccer. A second fight means a two-game suspension and a game misconduct; a third means a game misconduct, a minimum three-game suspension and a review by the league.

Interestingly however, if an instigator penalty is handed out in the OUA, the instigator receives the above treatment. The combatant deemed to have been forced into the fight receives only a five-minute major and nothing more. In Canada West, that non-instigator still gets kicked out of the game, but receives no further discipline.

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