I haven’t written much about my son’s recruiting journey, but now that he is exploring his path to junior and college hockey, I think it’s time to share.
The last time I wrote about him was after he attended his first junior hockey main camp. Now, he is in his senior year of high school, playing 18U AAA hockey, and starting to look at where he will play next year. This includes conversations with junior teams as he navigates his next steps.
The reality is that the new rules allowing CHL players to play in the NCAA next year are already impacting players like my son. I don’t claim to have a deep understanding of all the nuances of the CHL, USHL, BCHL, NAHL, or NCDC leagues. However, I wanted to share a few observations based on what I’ve seen and heard:
Top CHL players will start playing NCAA hockey next year. Beyond the CHL players who have already announced commitments to DI programs, I’ve heard of others planning to join top schools. These players may benefit from additional development time before signing professional contracts.
BCHL and U.S.-based players are shifting to the CHL. Many BCHL and American players, who might have traditionally played in the NAHL or USHL, are now looking to move to the CHL (OHL, WHL, or QMJHL). With eligibility no longer a concern, talented players are exploring this path as a viable option.
Junior leagues are redefining their roles. Every junior league, especially the BCHL, will need to reconfigure its value proposition as a development league. Players now have more options for paths to college hockey or professional opportunities, which could shift the dynamics across leagues.
Recruiting cycles are delayed. The ripple effects of these changes are already evident in the recruiting timelines. Decisions on tenders for next season appear slower than in previous years. As NCAA teams finalize their 2025/26 rosters, this will influence CHL and USHL recruiting strategies, eventually trickling down to other junior leagues.
As a parent going through the junior hockey process for the first time, patience seems to be a necessity. The landscape is shifting, and the impact of these changes will likely take time to unfold fully.
Recently, we have received the same question from players and parents during our webinars asking if a U18 (Canada) or U16 (USA) aged player should play on a U22 (Canada) or U19 (USA) team. This post provides some perspective on this topic.
In youth hockey, it’s common to hear about players “playing up” – joining a team at an older age level to challenge themselves or gain exposure. While this can be a great move for some elite players, it’s not always the best path for everyone. If you’re not going to be one of the top players on the older team, it’s often better to stay at your current age level or a younger one. Why? Because what matters most in youth hockey isn’t just saying you’re on an older team – it’s about developing the skills, confidence, and experience that will set you apart in the long run.
Here’s why playing at the right level for your abilities can be a game-changer for your hockey journey:
1. Development Comes First
The ultimate goal in youth hockey is to become the best player you can be, and that requires consistent development. Playing at a younger level gives you more opportunities to take on key roles, be involved in critical plays, and contribute meaningfully to your team.
More Ice Time: On a younger team, you’re more likely to play in key situations like power plays, penalty kills, and crunch-time moments. This experience is invaluable for your growth.
Skill Mastery: Repetition builds mastery. You’ll have more chances to handle the puck, take shots, and make decisions on the ice – all of which sharpen your skills faster than sitting on the bench or playing limited minutes on an older team.
2. Confidence is Key
Confidence can make or break a player’s performance. Playing at a level where you can excel boosts your self-belief and encourages you to push yourself even further.
If you’re constantly struggling to keep up with older players, it can be frustrating and demotivating. But if you’re thriving at your own level, you’ll build confidence in your abilities – and that confidence will carry over when you do eventually move up.
3. Exposure Happens at All Levels
One common reason players (and parents) push to play up is the belief that older teams get more attention from scouts and college coaches. But here’s the reality:
Scouts Watch All Age Levels: College recruiters and scouts aren’t just looking at older teams. They’re watching for talent and potential at all levels. If you’re a standout at a younger level, you’ll still get noticed – and probably more so than if you were just another player on an older team.
Consistency Matters: College coaches want players who have a strong foundation and consistently perform well. If you’re excelling at your age level, it’s a sign that you’re on the right track.
4. Team Impact Matters
Being a leader on your team – even at a younger level – teaches valuable skills that will help you as you progress in your hockey career.
Leadership Opportunities: On a younger team, you’re more likely to be a captain, lead your team in scoring, or play a pivotal role. These experiences are essential for developing leadership qualities and resilience.
5. It’s About the Long Game
Youth hockey isn’t just about today – it’s about where you’ll be in the next 5-10 years. If you skip steps in your development by playing up too soon, you might miss crucial foundational skills that you’ll need at higher levels.
Skill Progression: By staying at the right level, you can master the fundamentals that will make you a more complete player. This sets you up for long-term success, rather than short-term bragging rights.
Final Thoughts: Focus on Your Growth
At the end of the day, playing at the right level for your abilities is about prioritizing your growth as a player. You’ll still have plenty of opportunities to move up when the time is right, and by then, you’ll be ready to stand out. Remember, the goal isn’t just to say you’re on an older team – it’s to develop into the best player you can be.
Stay focused, work hard, and trust the process. Scouts and coaches notice players who are improving, regardless of what level they’re playing at. Your development is what matters most.
This past week, my kids played their first games of the season. We’re approaching the end of their time in youth hockey, and I’ve been reflecting on their journey to playing at the highest levels in recent years. One realization I had is just how much work it takes as a parent to help them get to where they are. So, I thought I’d capture my thoughts on the key factors that parents enable to improve their kids’ chances of success in hockey.
Many of these attributes may differ between high- and low-density hockey areas. We live in a low-density hockey area in Northern California, which means relatively limited access to ice time, insufficient high-quality coaching, and few high-level local teams for both boys’ and girls’ youth hockey. In high-density hockey environments, players may be less dependent on their parents to access the resources and competition they need to be successful. If you live in Minnesota or the Greater Toronto Area, it’s much easier to put your player in a position to reach their full potential.
Additionally, if your child is exceptional at a young age, like Sidney Crosby or Connor Bedard, they will likely have no problem finding success. But most kids aren’t prodigies, and parents play a crucial role in helping them develop and find opportunities in youth hockey.
Here are the biggest ways parents enable their child’s hockey success:
1. Getting them to the rink
I know this is as obvious as it gets. But beyond just signing the kids up and paying their fees, waking up at crazy hours or traveling long distances for practices and games is no small task. Often, it means parents need to make sacrifices like missing work, losing sleep, or spending hours in traffic. All of these are frequently overlooked aspects of the vital role parents play in ensuring players simply show up. This summer, I calculated that I drove at least 250,000 miles over the past 10 years just getting my kids to their sports events. That’s a lot of car time. Additionally, the car ride home is a critical experience in ensuring your child continues to love the game. If they begin to dread the car ride because it’s filled with criticism (e.g., being told everything they did wrong), parents can ruin their child’s hockey experience and destroy their motivation to continue playing.
2. Signing them up for multiple sports
There is so much written about how many professional athletes played multiple sports growing up before focusing on a single one. But that doesn’t happen without parents buying into the philosophy and registering their kids for a variety of activities. It’s not just about exposing them to different sports; it also involves managing practice and game conflicts, navigating tight schedules, and rushing from one sport to another. Parents also have to negotiate with coaches who may not be sympathetic to players participating in another sport when there are overlaps. These are additional challenges parents must face to help their child succeed.
3. Finding the best team or coach for their development
Parents play a critical role in determining where a player should play and which team or skills coaches they should trust to develop their child. For the most part, there are no Yelp or Amazon reviews for teams and coaches, so parents need to talk to other parents, synthesize information from social media, and use other online resources to find the best opportunities. Most parents aren’t familiar with all the nuances of youth hockey at each age group, so they spend a lot of time and effort making the best decisions. While Champs App is trying to provide a lot of this information, every journey is unique, and parents invest significant time and energy in making informed choices about which hockey path to take.
4. Financial investment
Hockey is an expensive sport. Candidly, with the professionalization of all youth sports, the average player requires their parents to spend a lot of money on team fees, equipment, travel, and private lessons. Only a few players have their hockey development subsidized through scholarships or municipalities that provide locally-owned rinks with volunteer coaches. For most, playing youth hockey easily costs thousands of dollars each season. As a parent, you are investing in your child’s overall development and should not expect a direct return on investment from hockey.
5. Hockey-specific development
Most parents don’t have the hockey expertise to coach their kids. If they do, it’s a tremendous advantage—assuming the parent handles it productively (which isn’t always the case for over-zealous parents who can inadvertently harm their child’s development). However, any parent can provide access to video (e.g., LiveBarn or other streaming services) at a young age, allowing the player to watch their own shifts. Teaching your child self-awareness and the ability to learn from mistakes using video at an early age is an invaluable asset that parents can nurture, even if they know very little about hockey.
I’m sure I’m missing other key roles that parents play in their son or daughter’s development, but these were the most salient ones for our family. Of course, my kids put in the work—both on and off the ice—to get to where they are today. However, the effort we invested as a family to enable their success was significant, and parents should be recognized for the essential role they play.
Justin was a forward with the Stratford Warriors Pee Wee team that was the A/E Tournament Champions in Ingersoll, Ontario back in 2006. Most recently he was a captain at the 2024 NHL All-Star game in Toronto.
Over the past decade, my children have attended at least one hockey camp each summer. From a hockey perspective, very few of these camps significantly advanced their development. However, the true value of these camps often lay beyond mere skill improvement. These camps often coincided with family vacations, provided fun experiences, helped them regain hockey shape after a break, or offered a glimpse into a college’s environment. It’s rarely worth traveling solely for a hockey camp unless there are other compelling reasons to visit the destination.
Tips: Necessary but Not Sufficient
At most camps my children have attended, coaches tend to focus on running various drills as a means to enhance players’ abilities. There is nothing inherently wrong with emphasizing skating, stickhandling, and shooting drills. Repetitions and fundamental work can be beneficial, especially for younger players (e.g., 12 and under). However, these camps typically involve large groups, with everyone undergoing the same repetitions. Individual coaching usually consists of sporadic tips and tricks as coaches move among the campers. While tips and drills are valuable, they rarely constitute comprehensive skill instruction. The USA Hockey Development Camps epitomize this approach—featuring excellent coaches who primarily offer pointers and tweaks over the course of several days.
This is why, for the past few summers, I have preferred enrolling my children in local private or semi-private lessons with experts rather than traveling for hockey camps. I would rather invest in trusted coaches who can provide individualized attention and feedback.
Belfry Summer Camp
This summer, I decided to take a chance on a camp that promised to focus on skill development. A few weeks ago, my son attended a destination hockey camp that yielded the highest return on investment (ROI) from a development perspective. The Darryl Belfry Camp distinguished itself from other camps because the coaching staff was dedicated to adding new tools to the players’ toolkits.
The camp had 22 skaters and 2 goalies, with 7 coaches on the ice, many using iPads to record segments of the sessions. Players spent 3 hours on the ice each day, accompanied by a daily 30-minute video review with Q&A and a 1-hour professional gym workout. Notably, there was not a single whistle used during on-ice sessions. Coaches explained and demonstrated drills using their voices without yelling. Each day had a specific skill theme that built on the previous day’s lessons, ensuring that by the end of the week, players had acquired a suite of new skills applicable to game situations. Examples of these skills included making area passes, various types of steals, and explosive skating with and without the puck.
One of my favorite aspects of Darryl Belfry’s coaching is his commitment to keeping the nets in their standard positions for drills. Even in small-area games, he simply shrinks the offensive zone but keeps the nets in place. This ‘ice geography’ approach teaches players to be acutely aware of their location relative to key markers like the faceoff dot and the boards.
My hope was that my son would learn 5 or 6 new skills by the end of the week. He ended up acquiring 8 or 9 new skills, ranging from hook passes to reading the position of the defense on zone entries. This represented a significant ROI for 4 days of training, with each new tool directly applicable to game situations. The personalized feedback report, complete with links to short YouTube videos of my son demonstrating the week’s skills, was particularly valuable. I have been a big advocate of providing feedback to players after attending a camp, but feedback is only as good as the effort put into it. In this case, the detailed feedback, supplemented by video, was especially appreciated.
Setting Expectations
In conclusion, it is crucial to set realistic expectations when choosing a summer hockey camp. If a coach claims, “We will be on the ice for 15 hours this week; your child will definitely improve,” take that with a grain of salt. While this might be effective for younger children, merely repeating the same bad habits does not make a player better. There are few coaches who can both manage a large camp and teach new skills simultaneously; they need to have a background in coaching and a commitment to continuous improvement. Otherwise, ensure that your other priorities are met and view the camp as an opportunity for your child to enjoy being on the ice and having fun.
Last weekend my 16 year-old son and I attended the Matterhorn Fit All Ivy League Men’s Hockey Showcase in Estero, Florida. The event was impeccably organized, drawing nearly two dozen coaches actively involved in coaching or scouting. One standout feature was the series of two 1-hour sessions where each coach personally introduced themselves and shared insights into their respective school’s unique hockey program. These sessions, akin to the conversations on the Champs App podcasts but more concise, provided a glimpse into the personalities behind the coaching staff and shed light on the attributes they value most in players.
Dedicated DI Coaches to Each Team
A notable aspect of the event was the assignment of a single DI coach to each team throughout all five games. This setup allowed players to develop a deeper understanding of their assigned coach over the weekend, fostering a more personalized interaction. Furthermore, the majority of coaches in attendance took the time to scout multiple games for each team, showcasing their dedication and thoroughness in talent evaluation.
One-on-One Conversations with DI Coaches
Unlike many women’s spring and summer showcases that are often bound by blackout periods limiting direct conversations with coaches, the Matterhorn Ivy League Men’s Hockey Showcase encouraged open dialogue with coaches. This facilitated valuable recruiting conversations for players, a particularly beneficial opportunity given the age range of players involved, typically spanning from 16 to 20 years old for men’s hockey recruiting, as opposed to the earlier recruitment timeline often seen in women’s DI hockey.
Thoughtful, Structured Feedback
Following the event, players received written feedback from their assigned coach, evaluating them on eight key attributes essential for potential DI players. This personalized feedback, accompanied by detailed comments, provided invaluable insights and guidance for players looking to enhance their skills and showcase their potential at the collegiate level. Having been to many women’s college hockey showcases, I wish some of them would provide the same level of valuable feedback to players.
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.
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.
The following is a post I wrote almost four years ago about MyHockeyRankings on an old blog I used to publish. Most of it is still highly relevant after all this time. I have added some additional new thoughts at the end of the post.
I spend a lot of time on the MyHockeyRankings (MHR) website. I don’t use the site because I care about the rankings of my kids’ teams, but I do see the rankings, so I am aware of what they are. However, there are many more valuable reasons to use the site that I find really insightful that I wanted to share. I will also put together my thoughts on what the watchouts and drawbacks are for MyHockeyRanks in a separate post.
To start, let’s remind you of why MyHockeyRankings was created and how it is intended to be used. As stated explicitly on their About Us page, the site was set-up to help with scheduling competitive games between clubs. Using a pretty simple algorithm based on goal differential, a rating is created for each team. The difference in ratings between two teams is their expected goal differential (EGD) between the two teams if they were to play each other (subtracting the lower rating from the higher rating). This methodology is used to normalize quality of opponent and calibrate one team versus another. I won’t go into the statistical analysis of the legitimacy of EGD, but the goal differential is only an expected value, and thus there will be a lot of variation in actual game scores. If the EGD is small, then if the two teams would play each other, then it likely would be a competitive game. If the goal differential is large (for me 4 or 5 goals is a significantly large gap) then it likely would not be a competitive game and it may not make sense for the two teams to play in the first place. This is especially helpful if there is a large tournament and the organizers are trying to group teams into competitive divisions or for leagues to draw the line between A, BB and B levels. There is a lot more detail to how and why, but that is the gist of the ratings. Well, now that each team has a rating, it is only natural to rank them. This is where much of the controversy starts with the MHR site, but we’ll discuss the use of rankings separately.
Schedule, Scores and LiveBarn
I track about 10 different teams at various clubs, levels and age groups and I find it much easier to see the schedule and scores in one single location thanks to MyHockeyRankings than going to each individual team’s website or leagues site to find the schedule and/or score. If I want to dive into a particular game then I might go elsewhere, but being able to see which of those teams has/had games in a particular weekend is very helpful. As a bonus, having the LiveBarn icon next to a game (especially if one of the teams is playing at an away tournament) it lets me know that I could watch the game if I wanted to. This feature was remarkably helpful for watching games for a prep school team that we are considering for my daughter. Without the MyHockeyRankings/LiveBarn partnership, I might never have been able to see several of the school’s games.
2. Scouting and Researching
When heading to a tournament it is highly likely that most of the teams we will play we won’t have ever seen or played before. We have used the MHR ratings to help decide which goalie to start in which games. If on the first day of a tourney we have two games and one team is clearly rated higher than the other on MyHockeyRanking, then the coach usually has some insightful information on who to start in each game. For a playoff game one coach asked me to download the most recent games of the team they will be playing, thanks to MHR I was able to see exactly when and where to find the game on LiveBarn. Finally, as mentioned above, being able to find games from potential prep schools for my daughter and watch their play has allowed me to research potential future schools/teams for her to play on based on the quality of their teams, including the LiveBarn video identification.
3. AA vs. AAA?
I care about my kids’ hockey development not the number of letters they have for their level of play. Since there really is no standard of what is AA vs AAA (which is a topic for another post), MyHockeyRankings also helps to compare AA vs AAA teams in an apples-to-apples manner. For example, I have one of my kids playing on a AA team this season that is rated slightly higher than the AAA team in our area. This is not a surprise, and while having a higher rating doesn’t really matter, there is a big difference between the two teams. The AAA struggles to compete and loses most of their games and their players are usually chasing the puck. Instead, nearly all the AA games my kids team plays are competitive and the players are developing a lot more both on defense and offense, especially when the games are close. While MHR didn’t really play a role in the decision on which team my child would play on, the ratings have provided validation that they are playing at the right level for their development even though it has one less ‘A’.
4. Scheduling Games
As mentioned at the start, this is the original intent of the MyHockeyRankings. Last season our team played about 30 games. Which is fine, but a few more would have been nice.
Since there weren’t any local teams that were available in the Spring, we looked to find a few teams that were 5 hours away for weekend exhibition games against 3 or 4 teams. Well, of course I used MHR to find the teams which would be most comparable to our team to reach out to (even though they were a level lower by letter). Once again, this is exactly the intended use of MHR, to help schedule and ensure competitive games.
5. Triangulation Between Levels
My daughter plays on a youth (boys) team and at some point she will switch to playing with the girls. One of the challenges is for me to compare her current level of play with the boys to the girls of her age. However, thanks to MyHockeyRanking and using their methodology, I can triangulate her team’s ratings to other girls teams. Since the local girls team plays enough games in the boys division, I can determine their equivalent boys rating and see the difference to my daughter’s team. It provides an additional piece of data to inform our decision on the where and when she should play in the future. I have used the same methodology to compare between levels between teams from Squirt to Peewee, from Peewee to Bantam and Bantam to Midget. For example, how does a Peewee AA team compare to a Bantam B team? Thanks to MHR I am able to figure out the answer to this question.
6. How are you trending? Last 10 Game Ratings
Figuring out if your team is trending up or down during the season is a pretty important insight. Almost all teams improve throughout the year, but how is your team improving relative to others. Thanks to MHR you can see if the last 10 games are accretive or dilutive to your rating. Also, with the help of a basic spreadsheet you take any time period and figure it out for yourself. As a data geek, I like the ability to analyze this kind of stuff.
Finally, as I admitted at the start, I am aware of the rankings for my kids’ teams. The ranking usually doesn’t vary too much from the start of the season to the end of the season, so once it has been established, not much point paying too close attention to it. But knowing where the team ranks on a national and state/regional level is good to know as a parent. It basically helps me set realistic expectations for where my kids are in their development and what goals to help them set for the coming year.
These are the benefits I have found from using MyHockeyRankings and when used properly it has provided helpful insights for several important decisions for my kids’ hockey development. However, while I have used site for ‘good’, it is pretty easy to use the site in the wrong way. My next post will discuss the watch-outs and using the site in a manner that goes against its original intent.
2023 Update #1: Another strength of MHR has been having USA Hockey use the rankings for at-large invitations to National playoffs. This way the best teams will still participate even if they didn’t win their district championship.
2023 Update #2: I have also used the Women’s College Hockey ratings as part of the college recruiting process. It’s been helpful to see how each of the conferences really compare to each other in terms of level of play. As an example, it shows how competitive the WCHA conference is, and that finishing 6th in that conference would be first or second in a different conference. You could be playing for a Top 10 team in the country and still not make the NCAA tournament. The NCAA might want to change it’s pairwise calculation (which I don’t really understand) and just use MHR for their at-large tournament selections.
