As a strong two-way defenseman, I generate scoring chances through puck rushes and shots from the point. My speed and hockey vision enables me to make the first pass, while my strength and stick work protect the puck at the blue line and when defending my own net. Off ice, I’m a dedicated athlete focused on improving my physical strength and conditioning. I value direct coach feedback and have a strong work ethic. Academics is a priority as I understand the importance of education for my future.
I have played net full time since the age of seven. I appreciate the challenge of playing against the best shooters every time I hit the ice and excel against top talent, posting a GAA of .948 in the last two seasons, while taking over 1,000 shots per season. I’ve been recognized at the Provincial level in Ontario as a top 2008 goaltender. I’m a competitor who can rise in the big moments. I look forward to the opportunities that lie ahead.
Tryout season has begun in both the United States and Canada. Having now gone through the process from 10U all the way up to 19U now, I have seen many of the different situations that occur at this time of year. The entire process was non-linear with lots of bumps along the way. Things didn’t always work out perfectly in the short term, but it all worked out in the long term. Based on our family’s experience, here are some tips for this year’s tryout season:
1. Player development is more important than winning games
Regardless of what age or level of youth hockey you play, it is 100% more important for your player to improve as much as possible rather than winning games. Now, losing sucks and winning championships can certainly help with exposure. But unless you are old enough to be recruited to the next level, given a choice between playing on a winning team, but not getting better or losing but taking major steps in your development – it should be a no-brainer which one to take.
2. The best coach should be the highest priority in deciding where to play
There are many many factors in deciding where to try out and play, including distance from home, cost, practice and game schedule etc. But the most important should be to find the best coach that will develop your player the most.
3. Try not to be the best or worst player on the team
All things being equal, you want to be in the middle of the pack player on a team – not the top or the bottom. Although or one season it is okay to be at the top or the bottom. Being the best means you may not be challenged as much as you are capable of. And being the worst can cause lots of frustrations. If you are in the middle, that is a great opportunity to work your way up the lineup if you can. Of course all players want to be on the power play and penalty kill. A good coach will cycle through all the lines on a team.
4. Politics is a fact of life
Like it or not, there is politics in tryouts. Just accept it for what it is and recognize that it may or may not work in your favor. Wasting energy on why a player was put ahead of yours is not going to be productive. The reality is that there is politics at every level of hockey especially at the district/provincial and national level. Just try to be the best player you can be and let the chips fall where they may. If you are that close to making or not making a team, then that is something that is within your control for next time by just getting better.
5. The most important training has already taken place
The last week of training before tryouts won’t likely be the difference between making a team and not. While there are small things that can help a player succeed at tryouts – the things that will most impact their level of play and success at tryouts will have taken place during the months leading up to tryouts. There shouldn’t be a need to spend 3 hours each night at the rink the week before tryouts.
6. Coaches are also evaluating the parents
Many coaches are judging parents as much as the kids. Nothing wrong with getting to know the coaching staff and how they plan to run the team. Also, it is important to make sure that you share the same philosophies on how the coach plans to run the team. But be aware that the coach is also evaluating if you will be a “high maintenance” parent.
7. Tryouts may not actually be tryouts
As kids get older (i.e. U14 and above), it’s okay that the coach already decided on many if not all of the players who will make the team. Tryouts are just a point in time. Depending on the club, many coaches run “development camps” leading up to tryouts. This way they can review players over an extended period of time. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with them using that evaluation period to already decide if they want a player on their team or not.
8. Many clubs make money on tryouts – don’t waste yours
Be wary of some clubs who use tryouts as a way to make money. There are many clubs who charge several hundred dollars for players to tryouts and will accepts 3-4 times as many players to try out as they have spots. While occasionally trying out for the “experience” or “getting more ice time” might make sense, you should know if your player has a real chance of making the team before you show up. Don’t waste your money on attending a tryout when that money would be better spent on a lesson or two with a skills coach.
9. Coaches aren’t perfect
Don’t expect perfection from coaches. Your player isn’t perfect and neither are coaches. Each club has a different way of evaluating players – some as a group with “objective” observers and some with just the coaching staff for a team. No method is perfect, however some are more sophisticated than others. Know before you show up what to expect and realize just like players and referees, coaches don’t always get everything exactly right. If you don’t what to expect before you show up to a tryout and know the pros and cons of how a club conducts tryouts, then you share some of the blame too.
10. Feedback is a gift
Ask for feedback in a professional manner after tryouts if you didn’t make the team. If an organization really cares about youth hockey development they would be happy to provide additional insights as to why a specific player didn’t make the cut. Take the feedback as a gift even if you disagree with the feedback. Do not argue or make your case as to why you saw things differently. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you at least know why and could potentially take action on the feedback. Get better for your next tryout and try out for a team where your player would not be so close to making or not making the team.
Bonus: Hockey makes players better people
Not making a team can be very emotional and challenging. But I guarantee, if you have a resilient player, it will all work out fine. Both my kids did not make teams in youth hockey, but they still ended up playing at the highest level of hockey for their age group when they got older. Take is as an good life lesson.
ICYMI: Watch this Episode on Girls Tryouts with Alyssa Gagliardi
You can easily select a coach & email template and the message automatically populates the coach’s info, school and your personal information from your Champs App profile. Pick the Upcoming Events template and the Messaging tool with magically insert your upcoming games or events into the message.
We currently have 3 sets of coaches that you can send emails to:
· Division I Women’s Hockey Coaches (all coaches)
· Division III Women’s Hockey Coaches (all head coaches and several assistants
· U Sports (Canada) Women’s Hockey Coaches (head coaches only)
Champs App Messaging sends real emails to coaches (regardless of whether or not they have an active Champs account). Coaches will receive the emails at their regular school email address (not within Champs App).
Send Yourself a Test Email
You have the ability to send messages by email address. So if you want to test the tool by sending an email to yourself you can. Or if you want to send an email to a non-college coach, you just need to put in their email address in the Step 1 box.
Message Templates
There are currently 4 templates that you can use to send emails to coaches. Just pick the template that is right for your situation. We will be adding more templates and features in the near future.
Note: The Subject line and the contents of the email can all be customized even after you select a template. This way you can ensure sending a unique message to a coach.
Make Sure Your Player Profile is Up-To-Date
Every template automatically populates with information from your Player Profile into the email. So if you want to save yourself time from entering the same information multiple times, make sure your current team, graduation year, jersey #, upcoming schedule etc. are up-to-date.
Email Details
Please note that the actual email gets sent via Champs App on a player’s behalf (with your name appearing as the Sender). Specifically, it is sent from a generic Champs email address. BUT, the “reply-to” email address is your own email address. In addition, your email address is included in the template by default. Most coaches probably won’t notice where it is sent from (they will focus on the name not the sender’s email address), but it is important for users to know exactly how it works.
This analysis look at the teams selected for the Girls Tier I U16 playoffs. Given the importance of being seen at Nationals from recruiting perspective, I examined the at-large team selections and the seedings.
As a reminder: If you are heading to the Tier 2 girls playoffs, you can still be scouted by DI coaches. This week I spoke with a DI coach who will be in East Lansing and will be looking for the top players from smaller regions that can’t easily play for a Tier I team.
Girls 16U Selections
Below you can see the ranking of the 16 teams who will be playing at the 16U Tier I Nationals. The 3 highlighted teams (Minnesota Magazine, Massachusetts Spitfires and Minnesota Hardware) are the at-large invitations, then there is the host team (Florida Alliance) and the other 12 are the district champions.
The USA Hockey 2024 National Guidebook provides the following description for how they decide on the at-large teams and seedings:
As far as the last team to miss the playoffs, the Mid Fairfield CT Stars had a 95.57 which was 0.93 below the last at-large team, Minnesota Hardware. Similar to the U14s, that is a pretty large difference in ratings (in other age groups I’ve seen a rating difference of only 0.01 or 0.02 between bubble teams) and thus there shouldn’t be much concern about the Stars not being selected based on their rating.
Girls 16U Seedings
For the U16 age groups, the seedings are non-controversial. They match identically to the MyHockeyRankings sorting of the 16 qualified teams.
However, if the selection committee looked at the last 10 games for each of the top 10 teams (as they appear to do in other age groups), there is a reasonable argument to be made for a re-arranging of the Top 8 teams. Specifically, two of the at-large teams could have been seeded higher. The same for Belle Tire. Especially since those teams’ full-year ratings were so close to the teams above them in the rankings.
Want to be scouted at Nationals? Use Champs App Messaging to quickly & easily let coaches know your game schedule
Let NCAA coaches know you’ll be at Nationals and your game schedule. The Champs App Messaging tool is the fast, easy way to send error-free messages to coaches before and during the event.
You can easily select a coach & email template and the message automatically populates the coach’s info, school and your personal information from your Champs App profile. Pick the Upcoming Events template and the Messaging tool with magically insert your upcoming games at Nationals into the message.
This analysis look at the teams selected for the Girls Tier I U19 playoffs. Given the importance of being seen at Nationals from recruiting perspective, I examined the at-large team selections and the seedings.
As a reminder: If you are heading to the Tier 2 girls playoffs, you can still be scouted by DI coaches. This week I spoke with a DI coach who will be in East Lansing and will be looking for the top players from smaller regions that can’t easily play for a Tier I team.
Girls 19U Selections
Below you can see the ranking of the 16 teams who will be playing at the 19U Tier I Nationals. The 4 highlighted teams (East Coast Wizards, NAHA, Team Wisconsin and the Connecticut Polar Bears) are the at-large invitations. Unlike other age groups, there is no U19 team from the Northern Plains district – thus the 4th at-large team. Then there is the host team (Florida Alliance) and the other 11 are the district champions.
The USA Hockey 2024 National Guidebook provides the following description for how they decide on the at-large teams and seedings:
Similar to the the U14 Tier 1 at-large Selections, it is unclear why the Minnesota Empowers and Tradition teams are not at-large teams. Maybe they opted out due to the higher priority of the Minnesota High School hockey playoffs. There is a lack of consistency of Minnesota Elite League teams accepting at-large invitations.
As far as the last team to miss the playoffs, the Pittsburgh Pens Elite has a 95.20 rating which is only 0.24 below the last at-large team, the Connecticut Polar Bears. But it seems this is large enough to make the Polar Bears the at-large selection.
Girls 19U Seedings
For the U19 age groups, the seedings do not match the rankings. Shattuck St Mary’s is ranked #1, but seeded #2 behind Bishop Kearney Selects. East Coast Wizards are ranked higher, but seeded lower than the Boston Jr Eagles. And NAHA is ranked higher than the Mid Fairfield Stars, but seeded lower. As described in the USA Hockey Guide above, it is likely a combination of head-to-head and Last 10 Games that were factors in these seedings.
Specifically, BK Selects beat Shattuck in their only game back in October, and but Shattuck still had a much higher rank in their last 10 games (see below). In addition, S-SM has a 0.65 higher rating than BK, which is quite large. So it seems the head-to-head was the primary factor in the flipping of positions. I suspect this will have impact the motivations of both teams should they meet in the playoff round.
The Boston Jr Eagles won the Massachusetts district, so it seems to make sense that they would be higher than the Boston Jr Eagles.
For NAHA and Mid Fairfield, being seeded #8 vs #9 doesn’t really make a material difference, since they will be in the same division. It just impacts the order of games and who is the home team when they play each other. The two teams never played each other during the season, but Mid Fairfield has the higher rating over the last 10 games.
Want to be scouted at Nationals? Use Champs App Messaging to quickly & easily let coaches know your game schedule
Let NCAA coaches know you’ll be at Nationals and your game schedule. The Champs App Messaging tool is the fast, easy way to send error-free messages to coaches before and during the event.
You can easily select a coach & email template and the message automatically populates the coach’s info, school and your personal information from your Champs App profile. Pick the Upcoming Events template and the Messaging tool with magically insert your upcoming games at Nationals into the message.
Being selected to go to Tier I Nationals is a big deal beyond just competing in the national playoffs to win a championship. Almost every NCAA DI women’s hockey program sends at least one coach to scout players and watch the best teams compete against each other. It gives U.S. players another great opportunity to be seen. While there are many elite players that play for teams that don’t end up qualifying for Nationals – it isn’t the end of the world for them, there are still many other opportunities to be seen (e.g. showcases, USA Hockey camps etc.). However, playing at Nationals is an excellent opportunity and timing to get seen. While the process to make Nationals for District winners and the host team is clear, the at-large selection process is a little murkier. This analysis looks at the at-large selections and how the teams were seeded.
I recently wrote about the selections for the NCAA Women’s Ice Hockey playoffs and how the selections and seedings compared to their MyHockeyRankings ratings. Unlike the NCAA, the USA Hockey National Playoffs actually uses MyHockeyRankings to help select the at-large teams for both youth and girls divisions. On the youth side, in addition to the 12 district winners, there are typically 4 at-large teams selected for Tier I (AAA). On the girl’s side, they also have 12 district winners. However, this is the final year where the girls host team gets an automatic spot in addition to that districts winner. So there are two teams from the Southeast district this year. Next year there will also be 4 at-large teams for Tier I girls.
Candidly, I haven’t taken the time to learn how the Tier II selections are made for Nationals. And I certainly don’t understand how the High School Girls teams are selected – because the last couple of winners have not really played high school hockey teams for their regular schedule, but mostly against other Tier I (AAA) classified teams. So this 3-part analysis will focus solely on the 14U, 16U and 19U Girls Tier I selection and seeds for next week’s USA Hockey 2024 Nationals taking place in Wesley Chapel, Florida.
Note: If you are heading to the Tier 2 girls playoffs, you can still be scouted by DI coaches. This week I spoke with a DI coach who will be in East Lansing and will be looking for the top players from smaller regions that can’t easily play for a Tier I team.
Girls 14U Selections
Below you can see the ranking of the 16 teams who will be playing at the 14U Tier I Nationals. The 3 highlighted teams (Minnestota Walleye, Assabet Valley and Chicago Mission) are the at-large invitations, then there is the host team (Florida Alliance) and the other 12 are the district champions.
The USA Hockey 2024 National Guidebook provides the following description for how they decide on the at-large teams and seedings:
From a selection standpoint, the only team which is not clear is the Minnesota Lakers not being selected for an at-large spot. The two reasons I can think of are a) the first at-large spot already went to a Minnesota district team (Walleye) so maybe the committee didn’t want to take two at-large teams from the same district. The other might be that I have heard Minnesota players care more about their High School playoffs than USA Nationals, therefore getting re-organized (after their High School season ends_ and the cost to play in Florida may not be appealing to some teams. If someone has more information on these decisions, please feel free to provide more information.
As far as the last team to miss the playoffs (excluding the Lakers), the Bay State Breakers were had a 95.48 which was 0.77 below the last at-large team, Chicago Mission. In my experience, that is a pretty large difference in ratings (in other age groups I’ve seen a rating difference of only 0.01 or 0.02 between bubble teams) and thus there shouldn’t be much concern about the Breakers not being selected based on their rating.
Girls 14U Seedings
Pretty much all the seedings make sense with 2 exceptions:
Minnesota Walleye were ranked #1 according to MHR, but Lovell Academy was given the #1 seed. The two teams never played each other during the season, so that could not be a factor. However, when looking at just the last 10 games for each team, it seems Lovell Academy had a higher rating by 0.3 goals – so that may have been the determining factor in giving Lovell Academy the #1 seed.
2. The Minnesota Green Giants and Philadelphia Jr Flyers were ranked #5 and #6 respectively according to MHR. But the Jr Flyers were given the higher seed. But looking closer, both teams had an identical 95.81 rating. And the Jr Flyers had a 0.3 higher rating over their last 10 games – so this could likely be the determining factor for promoting the Jr Flyers.
The next posts will discuss the USA Hockey Nationals Girls U16 and U19 selections and seedings.
Want to be scouted at Nationals? Use Champs App Messaging to quickly & easily let coaches know your game schedule
Let NCAA coaches know you’ll be at Nationals and your game schedule. The Champs App Messaging tool is the fast, easy way to send error-free messages to coaches before and during the event.
You can easily select a coach & email template and the message automatically populates the coach’s info, school and your personal information from your Champs App profile. Pick the Upcoming Events template and the Messaging tool with magically insert your upcoming games at Nationals into the message.
As a parent, I have now gone through multiple “hockey recruiting” processes. Beyond just club team tryouts, we have been through hockey academy recruiting, college hockey recruiting and even the beginnings of junior hockey tryouts. No matter how things worked out with each team/school being considered, I have repeatedly been pleased with the life skills my kids have learned from the experience. When I look back when I was their age, it would be several years into my college days before I would get exposure to many of these important life events.
I thought I would codify my Top 5 life skills kids can learn from the recruiting process.
1. Sales & Marketing
Even if you are a top talent player, you still need to let teams and coaches know you are interested in their program. Sending “cold emails” is a great skill to learn at any age – but getting this experience as a teenager is a pretty amazing opportunity. Learning how to introduce and promote yourself is not easy, especially in writing. Then to also persuade the audience/coach with a “call-to-action” (e.g. set-up a call, come watch me play, look at my video) is about as real-life as it gets in the sales and marketing world.
Furthermore, taking some swings when you know you will likely strike out is another great lesson. I know of a few players who reached out to coaches when they thought the teams wouldn’t be interested, only to find out they were interested and there were other reasons for them not contacting the player. You never know if you don’t ask!
2. The recruiting process is imperfect
The last company I worked at focused on the corporate recruiting process. Very few companies are great at delivering a great candidate experience. Most organizations have flaws because of the complexity and coordination challenges in organizations that are considering dozens of potential employees. The same holds true for hockey recruiting. It is unfortunate the number of times I have heard from parents and seen first-hand a bad candidate experience. Everything from never getting a response from a team, a coach ghosting a player after having a call and agreeing to next steps or just not being transparent/candid happens all the time. The college recruiting process isn’t perfect because coaches aren’t perfect. Many have not had regular company experience, so they may not be well-trained in hiring best practices unless someone taught them how. Not all of them care about closing the loop with players they won’t be making offers to. Good thing to learn for a teenager to learn at this age, because it reflects the real world.
3. Rejection
Every player gets rejected at some point. Whether it is not making a team or not getting an offer from a school. All the best companies (Google, Apple, Amazon etc.) attract the best people and reject the significant majority of folks who want to work at these companies. So even if your dream was to play at Wisconsin, or if you set very realistic goals as your top choice school, sometime there isn’t a match. However, things almost always work out in the end. You end up where you were supposed to be. Dealing with a major “hockey career” rejection in your teen years is not only something you will recover from, it will also make you stronger.
4. The importance of references and a good reputation
In the real world corporate recruiting process, hiring teams do reference checks. This is even more important in a team sport like hockey. Coaches will find folks they trust who really know the players they are considering. Once again, I can think of multiple examples where a connection to the coach (former coach or teammate, parent etc.) helped create opportunities or finalize an offer. As a player, having a good character and ensuring people of influence at every level can vouch for you, is a big deal.
5. Decision making – Having lots of good options
Finally, if things go well on both the hockey development and recruiting side, you will have options. Sometimes it will be easy to pick where you want to go. But sometimes, you will be in the fortunate position to have many great options. Figuring out all the different factors and prioritizing them across multiple opportunities can be both difficult and stressful. You may be afraid to make a life-impacting mistake. Learning how to make these types of decisions is probably the most important skill to develop. These types of situations come up all the time and figuring out which one-way door to choose is a phenomenal experience to learn at such a young age.
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:
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.
Women’s DI College Hockey Total Defensive Players & Commits by Year
as of December, 2023
With 44 DI women’s ice hockey teams now in the NCAA, having 88 first-year D is pretty much exactly what you would expect if each team carries an average of 8 defenders on their roster. While there are some puts and takes (e.g. Assumption adding 7 freshmen D and 35 5th year/grad students) the 2023-24 season seemed to be an above-average recruiting class on defense. With the large number of current players with a 5th year of eligibility still available to them, it is likely that the incoming 2024 class will be small than this year’s group of D recruits.
Our current analysis shows that the Class of 2024 already has at least 74 commits – and we are likely missing a few European players from our list. Therefore, there are likely a small handful of spots still open or become available because of the transfer portal, but pretty much it seems the recruiting door for 2024 defenders has pretty much closed.
For the Class of 2025, only ~50 spots have been filled. With Delaware announcing their new DI team starting in the 2025-26 season there should be several spots available for that team. In addition, there are certainly some openings on several other teams and certainly most of the NEWHA schools – with only 4 roster spots publicly announced across those 8 teams.
Women’s DI College Hockey Defense and Commits by School & Year
as of December, 2023
A few quick thoughts:
Ohio State and Bemidji State only have 6 defenders listed on their roster. Would be interesting to see how they would handle not having 1 or 2 of them for a period of time (injury, playing on national teams). Clearly a F would need to move back to help out, but that would still likely have the team at a disadvantage.
11 teams have 9 or more D on their rosters. For players being recruited to schools with such large rosters, they need to seriously consider the implications of being healthy scratched if they aren’t clearly in the top 6.
The next post will analyze the overall rosters of DI teams – including showing how many players each school has. There is a pretty big range in roster sizes (from 20 – 33 players).
