Interesting. I guess that is the Jr. effect- USHL/Jr.A. I wonder if the days of the most coming from HS programs is drawing to a close? It is pretty much that way in NCAA soccer these days with club programs generating the players rather than high schools.
Prep schools as well. A lot of the American kids enter prep schools doing that extra Year over before going the college route and trying to get that D-1 invite/scholarship.
Sorry for the late reply. Have a few minutes because I’m at an emergency veterinary hospital waiting for my dog to be treated at 4 in the morning (Yeah!). Apparently she has hemorrhagic gastritis or something like that? I won’t go into gory detail but it involves blood, diarrhea, vomiting and lots of it. It came on pretty quickly and got bad around 1am. Our regular vet doesn’t have emergency service, so a 45 minute drive and $600+ later, here I am.
Don’t get me started on the demise of the high school athletic model, particularly with hockey it seems. This is a topic for it's own thread, but when I played, there were very few prep and Junior teams and local players would go D1 right out of high school or after one PG (post grad) year at the most. I am sure there are legit reasons why junior and prep teams have proliferated over the years, but one needs to look no further than Minnesota HS hockey to see that the system can still work.
There are different routes kids take now, but one that seems fairly common is a combo of the things you guys mentioned. Kids will often come out of an elite travel program, some go to a prep school (we have a couple locally), some go to high school then prep school, some go the junior route.
There is a local kid who is a good example. His name is John Leonard and he’s playing for UMass now. I know him because he lives one town over and played lax with my middle son one year. He went to the only local D1 high school in our area, Cathedral (now called Pope Francis) and led Mass HS hockey in goals his Junior year. Rather than attend HS his senior year, he went to Green Bay and played in the USHL for a season. He was supposed to play one year and was already committed to UMass.
He was a 17 year old playing against kids as old as 20/21 and didn’t play a ton. So he ended up doing two years in the USHL and entered college at 19 instead of 18. Nowadays, kids who might be a little less talented may stay in a junior league until they are 20 and not enter college until 21. One of my daughter’s BFF’s was a junior at UMass and started dating a “freshman hockey player”, but he was a year older than she was
Another route that seems to be popular these days is to have a kid who is a very good HS player stay at his/her HS until their Junior year and then after that attend a prep school and repeat their Junior year and then stay for a Senior year as well. So, they basically do the old PG system, but a year early. I used to golf with a guy whose kid just did this. He left Pope Francis after his Junior year, did two years at Northfield Mount Herman and then ended up going to play hockey for a D3 school. A couple lesser D1 schools looked at him, but he wasn’t sure how much he would play. He also had a couple of Western Canadian minor junior teams approach him about playing a year with them before going to college.
The whole thing is crazy.
Anyway, congrats to UMass on a great regular season. They beat Maine 6-0 last light to finish 26-7 and the 1 seed for the Hockey East tournament.