If the LA Selects, Dallas Stars, and some Arizona teams are able to put together programs in less that 25 years that routinely send players to the NTDP program, how come you never see any players from the Jr. Flyers, for example, or other Delaware Valley programs?
The Detroit, Minnesota, and, even, Illinois kids are to be expected. But the "non-traditional" market teams are sending kids regularly. Hockey in the Delaware Valley was not elite 20 or 30 years ago, but there is no excuse anymore.
Any ideas?
(I realize this is a bit off-topic)
Probably a wide variety of factors that contribute. I don't know much about the Delaware Valley hockey scene but I'll throw out some ideas:
1) Two of the areas you mentioned (LA and Dallas) are two of the biggest hotbeds for athletes in all of America. Just getting a small group of kids that otherwise would have played football, baseball, basketball, soccer, etc. to try hockey can make a difference.
2) "Attention grabbing" events like the Gretzky trade to LA and the Stars moving to Dallas and their subsequent success. It's sometimes easier to come into non-established hockey markets and start from scratch rather than try and improve upon markets that already have a hockey culture in place, regardless of how successful they've been.
3) Options or a lack there of. While there's a few AAA clubs in California, you typically see all of the kids that advance coming from the same team/club at a specific time. The best players in the area typically all funnel to the same team, sometimes it's the JR Kings, sometimes the LA Selects. There's really no other competition for the talent. You either play for whatever the top team is for that age group or you leave the area for another team, like an Emerson Etem to Shattuck, Matt Nieto to Salisbury, or Rocco Grimaldi to Little Caesars. A lot of the high end California kids have been playing together since Peewee and before, like the powerhouse California Wave teams of the past. There's no high school hockey or local prep schools to worry about.
4) Hockey isn't a cheap sport to begin with. It's even more expensive to find competition when you're playing out of a non-traditional market like an LA. I played AAA hockey in LA and a lot of the kids I played with came from well off families. To kind of go back to ideas #2 and #3 it opens up a lot of opportunities for retired professionals to retire to Southern California and run hockey camps or become directors for the travel teams and dip into the pockets of rich parents looking for the best training for their kids they can buy.
5) Roller hockey. I didn't start playing ice hockey till I was 11 when Keith Gretzky was coaching the local ECHL team (and a public ice rink was opened, he decided to offer our roller hockey travel team discounted rates to try ice hockey). At the time, roller hockey was pretty popular in California. California was and is a hotbed for roller hockey talent in the country. Just look at last year's Team USA Inline hockey team (that won the IIHF World Championships Gold)...of the 14 members on the team, 8 are Californians. Pretty much every Californian of note in ice hockey got their start in roller hockey and then switched over. A good foundation of players to target for the ice hockey market. A lot of the California kids you're seeing lately are the first generation of roller hockey players to also get into ice hockey at a young age.
....I'd say, at least for California, the biggest factors of those I listed are a combination of idea #2 (Gretzky trade) and #5 (Roller Hockey). We've just now begun to see the benefits of Gretzky arriving in LA. It was too late for a few of the roller hockey generations when he got here but now we're starting to see kids come up that started in roller hockey and then got into ice hockey while young as well. The roller hockey is really important though in a non-traditional area like California.
