By Eric Vegoe/Special to USCHO.com
It’s never been a more challenging time to piece together a college hockey roster.
There are lucrative contracts when you get it right like the one Minnesota head coach Bob Motzko signed after taking the Gophers to consecutive Frozen Fours or the one Wisconsin head coach Mike Hastings signed after winning six consecutive conference titles at Minnesota State. Bench bosses who fail to make progress lead to open job postings at places like Miami, Bowling Green, Princeton, Lindenwood and Stonehill.
The landscape has changed drastically over the last 20 years in college hockey as programs have adjusted to the growth of junior hockey allowing players to develop while delaying their enrollment, coaches have dealt with early departures as professional hockey teams routinely pluck top talent and now coaches have to evaluate whether to take advantage of the extra eligibility granted by the NCAA post-COVID along with the courts freeing up players to essentially transfer at will with few restrictions. Oh, and Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) is probably coming next.
“Everybody’s got a different business model, and you’ve got to fit your business model to your program,” said Bemidji State head coach Tom Serratore. “What I try to do is recruit to our program like I would recruit to our school and to our community. To me first and foremost, anytime you’re recruiting, you have to recruit fit. And I think sometimes we can get sidetracked not recruiting fit, but you have to recruit fit first.”
Bemidji State is one of the programs navigating the fog of putting together their roster effectively this season by winning the CCHA by nine points and finding the right balance in traditional recruiting, keeping players out of the portal, bringing back players for extra years and grabbing portal options when they find a fit. The Beavers are one of the few programs whose average roster age of 22.79 was nearly unaltered by their actions under the new rules, but they were able to retain key graduate players Carter Jones and Kyle Looft in their system while making room in their lineup for freshman like Eric Pohlkamp and sophomore Lleyton Roed. Some of the other programs who tread lightly with changes to their roster makeup and have had success included Denver and Colorado College.
Tom Serratore shared that fits for his community, fits for his school, and fits for his program’s culture has been his guide. He wants players that will be comfortable in the northland and appreciate what Bemidji has to offer. The coach admits that every now and then they might go outside the box for a player — as sometimes just having an opportunity to play college hockey is enough — but by and large everybody’s going to be happy when the fit is right. One of the other key fits for the Beavers is making sure they focus their attention on older players during recruiting. Bemidji State recruits ranked 43rd at 19.31 years-old when they committed.
“We’re better off taking kids that we feel are good fits and when it’s an older kid, at least we have a good feel for how their game is gonna transfer to us when we get them,” said Tom Serratore. “When you take a young kid, there’s still a lot of development left and they’ve never been through any adversity… with an older kid, they’ve dealt with adversity. There’s a good chance that they played on the fourth line, there’s a good chance that they’ve had to sit out a game and they have just had to deal with some things through the grind of junior hockey that makes everyone’s job a little easier once they get to us.”
Tom Serratore also likes to keep the ‘engagement’ between a player and school short which shows up as the average age of a Beavers freshman was 20.58 years-old when they started their careers which ranked 35th meaning they only have to wait about a year between their commitment and the start of college hockey.
Rosters in Atlantic Hockey show their players often commit latest averaging 19.65 years-old when they verbal and enroll just shy of 21-years-old. Independent schools similarly pursue older players with an average of 19.78 year-old commits and the CCHA averaging 19.31 year-old commits.
How Did We Get Here?
Making sure schools find the right fit has been a challenge over the years. CCHA Commissioner Don Lucia has seen the process from a number of different angles over the years as a player at Notre Dame, coach at Alaska-Fairbanks, Colorado College and Minnesota and now in his current role with the CCHA.
“When I first got involved at Fairbanks, going back to my days at Colorado College and even early days at Minnesota, you were recruiting for the next year,” said Lucia. “If you needed eight guys, you were recruiting eight guys that calendar year to come in the following year… you weren’t recruiting 10th graders, 11th graders, nobody did that.”
Coaches pretty much knew back then what they were likely to lose to graduation and to professional contracts, which made it pretty simple to recruit players to replenish the depth chart. That process started to get a lot more difficult when USA Hockey started their National Team Development Program and started holding their tryout camps at the end of the minor hockey season.
“Early on in Ann Arbor you were recruiting the older team — [the U18s,]” said Lucia. “And then… teams started recruiting the younger team [the U17s] to get a leg up on those kids. And then once you have some 11th graders committing, others were following suit… it kind of snowballed from there in my opinion. And then it became going to watch the kids try out in Ann Arbor that were 9th and 10th graders and trying to lock those kids up before they even got to the program.”
The business model of college hockey started becoming increasingly more complicated trying to evaluate young players as essentially the entire roster of a USHL team would be committed somewhere at the start of the season. The reality was some coaches were off to watch bantam games, AAA games and USHL summer camps to start assessing players to potentially fill roles for players who hadn’t even made it to campus yet.
“There’s a lot of different ways for the traditional schools to recruit, we have to do it the old-fashioned way and bring guys in for basic training in late June,” said Air Force head coach Frank Serratore. “For the most part transfers don’t work, we don’t get fifth year COVIDs, we can’t bring in players at Christmas… but schools like Minnesota and Michigan can’t not take those guys.”
Still Chasing Talent
Across college hockey there are schools like Minnesota and Michigan with a strong habit of tying themselves to young commits. While coaches have pushed back the recruiting calendar a bit so that verbal offers aren’t permitted until August 1 before an athlete’s junior year, most of those schools do start to fill up the pipeline as soon as they can with the most highly touted players in their birth years. The most aggressive programs in lining up commits with their current roster are Notre Dame, Boston University, Boston College, Wisconsin, Harvard, Minnesota, Denver, Michigan, Penn State, Omaha, Minnesota-Duluth, North Dakota, Providence and Northeastern. The average of committed players who are still on the rosters of all these programs is under 18.
The Big Ten on average is the most aggressive league recruiting players with an average commitment of 17.55 years-old, Hockey East is next at 18.29 years-old and NCHC is third at 18.34 years-old. Those leagues have been busy investing in their hockey budgets and are eager on the recruiting trail to pick their players.
“Anytime you offer the young kids, I think you have to be selective because there’s a process that has to happen after that,” said Minnesota associate head coach Steve Miller. “It could be a two-year process, it could be a three-year process and it’s depending on what their next couple years look like, whether it’s high school, are they playing AAA, or did they decide to go to play in North America League, USHL or national team.”
“They’ve probably been the best player on their team for a long time whether it be all the way back to squirts or pee wee,” said Miller. “And the younger kids, they haven’t faced a lot of adversity in their career up to that point and now all of a sudden they’re playing USHL kids or NAHL kids who have been put through the wars of junior hockey.”
Miller said he tries to make sure he’s recruiting the right players from good families that work hard and then have at least two of three key attributes — hockey sense, compete and overall skills package from skating to hands to shooting.
“You’ve got to have two out of three. If you’re a world class competitor and you’ve got a great brain, great instincts with a fine skill package, then I can coach that and make him better. If you’ve got the unbelievable instincts, unbelievable brain to go with a very good skill package and your compete is fine, then I’ve still got two pretty good pieces and I will push you to be a more competitive player. If you’re just recruiting a guy who has got high compete and he doesn’t have a skill package and doesn’t have great instincts that’s gonna be a challenge.”
Making the Pieces Fit
While we’re still seeing colleges go after young players, the number of open lockers and scholarships in college hockey haven’t been opening up as quickly which has created a traffic jam of players with long commitments.
Chris Heisenberg runs a Google Sheet that tries to track commitments and decommits each recruiting cycle and the number of players parting ways from their pledge historically would be in the teens but has routinely been over 70 per birth year recently because of the logjam. Overall, there have been hundreds of players who have verbally committed to D-I hockey programs the past six years and have decided to play D-III, club hockey or not even pursue hockey at the next level as well.
There are seven programs in college hockey where the time between commitment and enrollment is less than a year, programs like Alaska Anchorage, Long Island, Stonehill, St. Thomas, Robert Morris, Lindenwood and Augustana have spots as they build or rebuild their programs, but more often the trend can be at up to a three year wait to get to programs like Notre Dame, Penn State, Boston University, Wisconsin or Minnesota.
“You have to be a pretty good hockey player to play division one hockey right now,” said Frank Serratore. “Division I hockey has always been good, but it’s never been better than it is right now. High school kids will say they love hockey, but in juniors they’re taking buses all over, playing 80 games versus men. Kids sometimes find out that they just liked hockey and at a certain level, hockey hurts. The kids who make it today, you can doubt a lot of things, but you can’t doubt their love of the game after living the way they have to live in juniors for two or three years with buses, cold pizza, ice packs.”
The entire process dealing with full recruiting pipelines where schools can have 20 to 30 committed players, constantly adjusting projected future rosters due to players getting extra seasons of eligibility or incoming experienced transfer players pushing out the availability of open roster spots can be confusing, but Miller says there is one point in college hockey history that weighs in the back of a coach’s mind when making the tough decision to delay a player’s enrollment.
“April Fool’s Day of 2013 the game changed because one of the most successful college coaches in the history of the game was fired in George [Gwozdecky],” said Miller. “I think everyone looked at that and said, ‘How could you fire that guy?’ And I think it just changed. I think then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘We’re only bringing in the guys that are good enough to play for us.’ If Gwoz is getting fired, then any of us can get fired. And if any of us can get fired then we’ve got to make sure we get the right players to the university.”
