This is an update to our quarterly posts which track the number of publicly announced commitments in DI women’s college hockey.
We’ve Changed our Commit Tracking Methodology
For this update, we have significantly changed our data collection methodology on tracking women’s college hockey commits. In previous quarterly updates, we primarily relied on data from the Women’s College Commitments (WCC) tracking page. Using their data we were able to track announcements on a monthly bases and show trends month-over-month and year-over-year:
Q3 2023 DI Women’s College Hockey Commitment Rate Update
However, we always knew that their data only represented a percentage of all commits for a given year (and relied on the data to be “consistently incomplete” year over year). For example, for the 2023-24 NCAA DI women’s college hockey season, there are 284 first-year players. While WCC only recorded 185 of those commits – so, only about 65% of all commits. While it is almost impossible to track every commit, since many players don’t make public announcements & it is much harder to track European commits, we have endeavored to be more holistic in data collection.
Our new method includes not just WCC, but also information from Elite Prospects, social media posts by players and teams, youth team website rosters and any other public information we can find. As a result, we have redesigned how we present the data and will only present the data from a quarterly perspective going forward.
As a result, we believe we are closer to tracking ~90% of all commits which is much higher than our previous tracking of ~65%.
Q4 Commitment Details
We recently published the status of women’s college hockey DI commits by position and discussed our analysis on “where and why” about the numbers:
Below is how the overall data is trending for commits & by position. As discussed in the previous posts, the incoming class of 2024 is almost full, but there seems to be many spots still open (especially at NEWHA schools) for 2025.
However, it appears that the total size of the incoming 2024 class will be smaller than previous years – mostly due to 5th year Covid eligibility for many student-athletes reducing the number of available spots. For 2025, it is a little too early to tell, but it looks like it will be a regular sized class with over 280 commits – especially with the addition of new DI women’s hockey team, the Delware Blue Hens.
By-Position Year-Over-Year Commit Rate Comparison
Here is the same data as above, but broken out by position in comparison to previous years.
Comparing Q4 to Q3 2023 Total Commits for the Class of 2025
While not apples-to-apples, below is a table comparing the number of commits for the Class of 2025 from Q3 2023 to Q4 2023. As you can see about 125 commits have been announced during the last 3 months.
