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.
If your choice is between going to a NEWHA team and a top-rated DIII team, you should seriously weigh a number of factors into your decision rather than just being able to say “I play DI hockey”.
Before discussing the inputs to your decision between a NEWHA and a top DIII hockey school, let’s first set some context comparing the NEWHA conference and the top programs in DIII women’s hockey.
A while ago, I interviewed Kerstin Matthews back when she was the Head Coach at St Anselm College and she discussed how her team was really a DII team but played a DI schedule. She also explained how there are some DII and DI schools in the NEWHA. She gives a great explanation on how the NEWHA conference is now able to compete for the NCAA Women’s Hockey National Championship:
NEWHA Hockey
The NEWHA conference is very competitive and pretty well-balanced. Assumption and Stonehill were added over the past two seasons and they both had some success right away. There hasn’t been a single dominant team in recent years, with different conference champions the past few seasons. So within the NEWHA, players will experience a good level of competition throughout the season. In addition, as the programs mature at the DI level, one would hope that the level of play continues to elevate year-after-year.
However, the reality is that the NEWHA conference as a whole doesn’t fare very well against the rest of the DI women’s teams right now. This past season, the NEWHA Conference went 1-44 in their non-conference games. The one win was a 1-goal mid-week game in early January at the end of Christmas Break by Franklin Pierce against Dartmouth.
It’s great that the winner of the NEWHA Conference gets an automatic spot in the NCAA Women’s College Hockey playoffs. Every conference winner should get a berth. But the numbers show they aren’t even close to having one of the top 11 teams in the country to compete in the NCAA Playoffs. According to MyHockeyRankings, all 8 NEWHA teams were rated at the bottom of the DI Women’s Hockey rankings this past season. Thus, it is no surprise that the team representing NEWHA in the NCAA Playoffs has been outscored a combined 16-2 in the two games of the opening round the past two seasons.
Note: The NCAA just announced they will move from 11 to 12 teams in their NCAA Women’s DIII Hockey Playoff tournament.
Beyond the level of play, potential recruits should also be factoring in roster size and athletic scholarship money. Half the NEWHA teams had 27 or more rostered players, with Sacred Heart carrying 33 players. Given a maximum of 18 athletic scholarships per program, many student-athletes are paying there own way. And with a team only able to dress 20 or 21 players per game, several are being healthy scratched each game.
Do your research on academics
This post doesn’t cover the quality of academics at the schools being discussed because I don’t really know all the details of each school. However I have heard many times that the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) schools are top-notch. The NESCAC includes top rated teams like Amherst, Middlebury, Colby College and Hamilton College. At the same time, every NEWHA and DIII school has disciplines that they are strong in that may line up with a potential recruits intended major. Doing your research and seeing if there is a good match is critical when looking at your options.
All of this should weigh into the decision of playing NEWHA vs high-level DIII.
NEWHA vs. Top DIII Hockey
Let’s now compare the level of hockey between the 8 NEWHA teams and the Top 8 DIII women’s hockey teams this past season.
NEWHA Conference 2023-24 MyHockeyRankings
DIII Women’s Hockey 2023-24 Top 8 MyHockeyRankings
As you can see, the top 8 DIII ratings are very similar to the NEWHA ratings – implying they are comparable in levels of play and would have competitive games between them. This is also likely why you hear some DIII coaches say that they could beat a DI team.
How to decide
Rather than just focusing on just DI vs DIII, the following factors should really be prioritized before making a decision:
Academics / Education
Cost
Potential for individual and team hockey success (winning, playoffs etc.)
Cultural fit with team and school
Playing Time
Being able say “I play(ed) DI hockey”
Depending on your expected role on the team, it seems that all else being equal, the school/academics should be the most important factor in your decision.
At Champs App, we have discussed at length all the attributes to consider when deciding on a women’s college hockey program, but this specific choice of alternatives seems to really highlight the need to figure out your personal priorities and the importance of selecting the right academic opportunity for you.
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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.
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With the announcement of the 11 teams participating in the 2024 NCAA Women’s DI Hockey Championship, I decided to take a look to see if the at-large team bids made sense. In the past, there seemed to be at least one or two teams that got snubbed. This year, it looks as though the committee pretty much got it right with the 6 teams added beyond the 5 conference champions.
At the same I was also curious about how different the level of competition was between conferences. While I know the WCHA is known as being the best conference in the country, I wondered how big a difference the level of play was between conferences this past season. There were a couple of surprises. And I believe they could have implications for a player’s recruiting process.
For this analysis I used the MyHockeyRanking algorithm for the team rankings. The NCAA’s methodology is completely different and explained here. Neither the NCAA’s methodology nor MHR’s algorithm is perfect. I have discussed in detail the pros and cons of MHR in the past, but I personally believe it is the most accurate view of the full-season performance of a team. Especially since I am sure that every NCAA DI team plays to win and not to ‘the score’ (i.e. goal differential) like what happens occasionally in youth hockey.
When you exclude the conference champions, pretty much the next 6 best teams were selected for the tournament. There could be an argument made for St Cloud State. Given that there were already 4 WCHA teams selected, statistically they were essentially tied with Clarkson, and the NCAA uses the pairwise ranking (which is difficult to calculate, so I don’t fully understand it), I am okay with their decision. While pairwise ranking might reward wins, in my opinion it doesn’t weight strength-of-schedule sufficiently.
Analyzing the Seedings
Note: Bold = Conference Champion
Looking at the seeding, the most-obvious disconnect was with Minnesota-Duluth being given an 8th seed but having a #5 ranking. Once again, it would not surprise me if the NCAA did not want 4 of the 5 top seeds to be from the WCHA. Unfortunately, this means UMD will likely play Ohio State in the 2nd round instead of a Clarkson or a Colgate if they were seeded higher.
From a recruiting perspective, it was interesting to see the large variability in the average ratings for each conference.
Comparing Conference Competition
As you can see, the competition in the WCHA is >1 goal more than the next best conference, the ECAC. In other words, on average a WCHA will beat and ECAC team by ~1.32 goals.
In addition, for this past season, the NEWHA conference performed at a significantly lower level of play than all the other conference by 3+ goals. In fact, all 8 NEWHA teams were ranked as the bottom 37-44 teams in DI NCAA Women’s Hockey according to MyHockeyRankings. In an upcoming post, I will compare playing in the NEWHA at the DI level to playing at a top DIII school from a recruiting perspective. I do think there are some nuances that are important to consider when choosing a school and making the right choice for your personal situation.
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.
Back in 2020, when Champs App first started, we tracked the female representation in the coaching staffs at NCAA DI and U Sports women’s hockey. Now, 3 years later, it is time to compare how the number of female coaches has changed during this time.
Over the past three years, there has been a notable increase in the representation of female head coaches within Division I women’s college hockey teams. In the 2020-21 season, female head coaches accounted for 14 out of 41 total coaching positions, comprising 34% of the total coaching cohort. However, by the 2023-24 season, this number has risen significantly, with 21 female head coaches out of a total of 44 coaching positions, representing an increase to 48%. This upward trend highlights a positive shift towards greater gender diversity and inclusivity within the coaching landscape of women’s college hockey, indicating a growing recognition of the value and expertise that female coaches bring to the sport.
While the ideal number is probably not 100% for female head coaches at the NCAA women’s DI level, it is nice to see the numbers continue to climb. Having spoken to so many male DI women’s coaches, it is clear that in most cases they are doing a great job in their roles. However, the much bigger opportunity is in increasing the number of female coaches on the men’s side of the game, where female coaches still represent significantly less than 1% at the men’s college level. There have been inroads made over the last few years, with NCAA DI head coaches participating in NHL development camps. This season, Kim Weiss is an assistant with DIII Trinity and Jessica Campbell is an assistant coach with the AHL Coachella Valley Firebirds. But when it comes to full-time roles, I am still waiting to hear about female coaches even being considered for a DI or DIII men’s team head coaching job.
From 2020 to 2023, there has also been a significant increase in the number of assistant or associate head coaches in NCAA Division I women’s hockey teams due to teams now being permitted 3 assistants. In the 2020-21 season, female assistant or associate head coaches accounted for 52 out of a total of 79 coaching positions, representing 66% of the coaching cohort. This number has seen a significant rise by the 2023-24 season, with 65 female coaches out of a total of 98 coaching positions, equaling the same 66% of the coaching staff. Conversely, the number of male assistant or associate head coaches also increased from 27 to 33 during this period, but their overall proportion remained constant.
During the time there has been significant increases in female coaches at the NCAA DI women’s hockey level for both head & assistant coaches, there has been no change in the number of female coaches in Canada U Sports women’s hockey. In fact U.S. teams surpassed Canadian schools in terms in percent female representation. Note: no data was collected for U Sports assistants back in 2020
Last week, I re-watched the Canada vs Czechia IIHF U18 Women’s World Championship semi-final game. Czechia won the game 4-2 after losing to Canada in the Group A game 8-1. I noticed that two of the Czechia goals were a direct result of major mistakes by the Canadian defenders. I then saw that the shots on goal were heavily in favor of the Canadians when the score was 3-2 at about 43-11 (ended up being 47-12 for Canada).
This got me thinking, how could Canada lose a game that they so clearly dominated in terms of offensive opportunities?
Two thoughts came to mind:
Czechia did an amazing job learning from their group game with Canada and played a defensive structure which minimized Canada’s high risk chances. Czechia then capitalized on the few opportunities they had to score.
Similar to my observations about the USA Hockey U18 selection process, Canada probably puts a bigger emphasis on fielding a team with offensive D than well-balanced defenders. As a result, a couple of defensive mistakes cost them the game.
This is just my hypothesis, I could be completely wrong. And let me be clear, any player that makes the Canada or U.S. U18 teams are exceptional players. They can all skate well, pass well and shoot well. There is no doubt each of them deserved to be on the team. But maybe, they are too similar in their skill set?
When it comes to roster construction, sometimes you need to include one or two 200-foot players to complement the more offensive players. Specifically, there are usually tradeoffs between a great puck handling D with a hard shot vs. someone who is technically better at 2-on-1s, clearing players in front of the net, playing the penalty kill or defending 1-on-1 zone entries. An analogy would be having 7 Erik Karlssons playing defense for a single team – at some point in important games against good teams there will be times you need the D to keep the puck out of your own net. Once again, this is not to say that those highly skilled U18 players aren’t good defenders, but when they go up against the top 2 or 3 forwards on a national team, they will also need to be technically strong on defense.
Let’s look at some data to support why I can understand how a coaching staff would put together a roster with so much offensive power at the U18 level.
2023 IIHF U18 World Champsionship Shot Totals
Canada outshot their opponent by a 6:1 ratio throughout the tournament. They also had over 40 shots per game. I would suspect they felt the team could outscore all opponents as long they didn’t have any major defensive hiccups.
Of course, you are probably asking – weren’t they planning to play the U.S.? Like all Canadian teams, they probably expected and planned to play the U.S. at some point – likely in the gold medal game (given the new format of A/B group play this year, they wouldn’t play each other in group games). So Canada would still need to be prepared to play a high-powered offensive USA Hockey team.
Then I looked at the shot total for the 2023 Under-18 Series which took place in Lake Place between the Canada and USA. Team Canada swept all 3 games against the U.S. team by a combined score of 15-3. Here were the shot totals:
uSA Canada u18 Summer Series SHot Totals
A couple of possible reasons for Canada to justify having highly offensive defenders… Either the felt they could still outscore Team USA and defend well enough to beat them. Or, maybe their D were never tested enough in the USA-Canada Series to expose some of the technical weaknesses against world-class scorers.
So what?
During my experience attending and analyzing multiple USA Hockey camps/events, I have felt that the players being selected have had their offensive abilities overly weighted in the evaluation process. Now, I am fully onboard with most of the high-end, offensive D being the ones being picked. However, including one or two defenders who can also keep the puck out of your own net at critical points of an important game can be the difference between winning and losing in the medal rounds. Having a little more balance on the blue line could be the difference between winning and losing in big games.
Over the past couple of years of tracking women’s DI hockey, I had a hypothesis that team success was highly correlated with the total experience (i.e. the numbers of years playing college hockey) of the players. I thought of it like an equation:
Team Skills x Team Experience x Coaching = Team Success
Note: This definition of Coaching includes all the resources and coaches (like strength & conditioning or video) associated with a program, not just the 3 or 4 primary team coaches.
While Team Skills seemed intuitively the most important attribute, I hypothesized that Team Experience would be close behind. However, the analysis I conducted shows that Team Experience is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for being a ranked team. So, scoring high in all 3 attributes creates a powerhouse team. But, having a huge amount of Skills could still make up for a lack of Team Experience.
First let’s look at the data. To normalize for the different roster sizes (since there is a range of 20 to 33 players across all 44 DI teams), only the oldest 21 players were included in the Team Experience calculation. This number was based on how many players typically dress for any single game. And then assumes if any first-year players are on a large roster team, they must be playing like they have at least 1 year of experience. Since it is too time consuming to calculate the actual team experience by game, this seemed like a reasonable proxy.
From the analysis, the teams seem to be segmented into 5 categories:
1. Doing well as expected
Clearly Ohio State has all the key ingredients needed for success. The #2 most experienced team, lots of skill and one of the best coaching staffs in the country.
2. Doing well with an experienced roster
There are a few teams that appear to be peaking with experienced rosters. They also have some highly skilled players, but not as deep as the powerhouse teams. These include St Cloud State, Quinnipiac and Clarkson.
3. Doing well with an inexperienced roster
The most skilled teams tend to do well year-after-year. These include Wisconsin, UMD and Minnesota.
4. Not doing well with an inexperienced roster
Some teams that have done well in the past, are not doing as well this year – likely due to having such a young set of players. These include: Harvard, Vermont and Bemidji State.
5. Not doing well with an experienced roster
Without a deeper dive into the individual skill-level for each player on these teams, it’s hard to know exactly why they aren’t higher in the rankings. But the following teams have a ton of experience, but haven’t been able to translate them into a Top 15 ranking: RPI, Syracuse and Merrimack
Estimating the Team Success Equation
The original hypothesis that Team Experience would contribute more than 1/3rd of the weighting to team success now seems too generous. Without doing a more rigorous statistical correlation (r-squared) analysis , it seems be more in the 1/5th range (plus or minus). This in turn implies the disproportionate importance of Team Skills regardless of experience.
Implications for Recruiting
If you are not going to a perennial powerhouse team (e.g. the top WCHA teams), incoming recruits should be aware of where the program they are joining. Which years are the current most-skilled players on the roster? If those top players will be graduating as you will be an incoming recruit joining the program, you should expect that it may take some time to rebuild the team. At the same time, if the highly skilled players are in their first or second year, then a recruit could be part of the immediate success of the team. Recruits should be aware of the risk that a team could peak then regress as they join the program.
