For 2022 commits, they have now surpassed the equivalent rate as 2021 commits. There are now 206 2022 commits as of March 31, 2002 compared to 202 commits the same period last year. Based on previous years, there will probably only be 10-15 more commits for 2022.
2023 Commits
As of March 31st, 2022, only 97 commits have been made for DI programs compared to 163 (2021) and 139 (2022) at the equivalent time before starting for those grade years. With USA Nationals now complete, I would expect the commitment rate to increase in April and May. However, given the absolute numbers it seems that there will also surely be less 2023 commits than previous years (typically about 214 commits). My back-of-the-envelope math says that overall there will likely be between 30 and 40 less 2023 commits compared to 2021 and 2022. From talking to DI coaches, it seems the reasons extra year of eligibility and the transfer students from DI, DIII and Canadian universities. On the positive side, Stonehill College starting in 2002 and Robert Morris University beginning their recruiting for 2023, I would suspect the gap closes slowly over the next 9 months with an additional 10-20 spots being available for those schools (otherwise my estimates would look even worse).
Goalies
Four goalies committed between January and March, 2022; one for 2022, one for 2023 and one for 2024. This is consistent with what DI coaches have been saying on the Champs App Podcast, that the goalie process is later than for skaters. There are still only six 2023 goalie commits with an overall target of about 20 goalies per year.
Top 10 Schools
There were only four Top 10 commits in Q1 2022 and three of them were for Minnesota.
Data assumptions:
Data commitment dates – source: collegecommitments.com
Transfers between DI programs are not included in the number of commits
For 2022 commits, they are all caught up to the same rate as 2021 commits. There are 193 2022 commits as of Dec 31 for compared to 191 commits the same period last year. Based on previous years, there will probably be on ~20 more commits for 2022.
2023 Commits
As of December 31st, 2021, only 83 commits have been made for DI programs compared to 152 (2021) and 134 (2022) at the equivalent time before starting for those grade years. So the big questions that remains is: Will there be less 2023 commits than previous years (typically about 214 commits) or is the recruiting process just slower this year given everything that is going on with Covid and the extra year of eligibility?
Goalies
Three goalies committed between Oct and Dec, 2021, but what is interesting is that they were all for 2022. This is consistent with what DI coaches have been saying on the Champs App Podcast, that the goalie process is later than for skaters. There continues to only be four 2023 goalie commits with an overall target of about 20 goalies per year.
Top 10 Schools
There were quite a few commits (and transfers) from the Top 10 Schools in Q3 2021.
Data assumptions:
Data commitment dates – source: collegecommitments.com
Transfers between DI programs are not included in the number of commits
Total number of commits for 2021 was 215
Please keep in mind there were no adjustments in the number of schools each year (e.g. RMU, St Michaels, Stonehill)
Note: I wrote the first draft of this post before the NCAA announced they would expand the number of teams for the Women’s Ice hockey tournament from eight to eleven in either 2022 or 2023. While I applaud the NCAA for the decision and understand why they would increase the % of teams that qualify to match the men’s side at 27% of teams qualify, my thoughts below still stand. I also want to emphasize that I realize it is operationally complicated and expensive to have more teams qualify, but that should not stop the initiative to find creative ways to make this a win-win for the NCAA and women’s ice hockey.
Last weekend I was asked by one of the DI women’s college hockey teams to share the Close the Gap graphic on our social media accounts. However, when it comes to this kind of stuff, I like to be educated on the topic. I had just skimmed through the Kaplan Hecker & Fink report the night before and rather than just re-post what everyone else has done, I thought I would share my 2 cents on the topic. These opinions are based on what I’ve learned over the last year about women’s college hockey, but also my 20+ years working with startups and high growth products.
Let me explain, one of things I have seen firsthand over the last year in-person and via USA Hockey and Hockey Canada data is that Women’s Hockey is a fast growing sport and is very similar to a startup. And startups should not be treated the same way from a business perspective as a highly profitable large corporation. With this as background, let me share 5 opinions on the matter. I put the simple hockey recommendation first and the business ones later, since they are a little more complicated to explain.
1. Why not 14 or 16 teams?
Let’s start with the fact that I don’t really understand how teams are selected for the women’s NCAA ice hockey playoffs. However, what I do know is that last year it didn’t seem like the actual Top 8 pairwise teams in the country were the ones who were selected for the tournament. Specifically, definitely Minnesota and probably Clarkson should have been there.
As much as 11 or 12 sounds like a good number, why couldn’t it be 14 or 16 teams tha.t qualify for the NCAA playoffs? From my analysis, there is only a small standard deviation between teams that are ranked from about 7-16. Specifically, the expected goal differential between any of those teams would likely be about 1.2. In other words, about 80% of the games between these teams would on-average be determine by only 1-goal – which should make for some pretty exciting games.
I don’t want to go through all the possible ways to make it work, but having 2-4 regional play-in games would seem to promote excitement and engagement. This would be in addition to 6-8 teams getting ‘byes’ straight to the “quarter finals”. These extra play-in games would not dilute the process and give teams a chance to feel what it’s like to be in the NCAA tournament. I don’t think Women’s College Ice Hockey should just look for parity with the Men’s programs – instead. they should do what’s right for their own sport – and 14 or 16 seems like the right number to me. (By the way, I think the same logic could easily apply to the men’s side of things as well).
2. Women’s College Hockey could be a Star
In business there is a famous slide called the BCG Matrix which describes where a business stands relative to other businesses on two dimensions: growth and relative market share. In the case of the NCAA, market share would be total college sports revenue. In business terms, football and men’s basketball are Cash Cows – generate tons of $, but are low growth sports. However, Women’s Ice Hockey while not yet a big money-maker, is high growth. They would be in the top right quadrant and currently be considered a ‘?’ as a business. In many large corporations, small businesses that are Question Marks can be underfunded and de-prioritized as the Cash Cows get all the resources and attention to keep shareholders happy (sound familiar?). However, this can be short-term thinking because the future may actually be in one of the small ideas that grow to dwarfing the incumbent businesses. All you need to do is to think of how the iPod started out as a teeny business for Apple relative to their Mac business, but then it became the dominant product leading to the iPhone and iPad. For the NCAA, the future might be in one of these women’s sports – especially women’s ice hockey. This leads into my next point…
3. Dollar Spent Per Student Athlete should be higher for Women’s Ice Hockey than Men’s Ice Hockey
This seems counter-intuitive but hear me out. Women’s College Ice Hockey should be treated like a startup. And startups over-invest during their early years to grow their products and brands until they hit scale. All you have to do is look at how Amazon lost money for years until they achieved scale in their core business. Keep reading below for the business rationale for investing in startups.
Now, this does not mean just throwing money at the sport. I think one of the best recommendations in the KHF Report is to find ways to combine both the Mens and Women’s National Championship events together. This way you can spread the fixed costs over a larger base, and even better, you can use bundling to promote both sports (e.g. sell ticket packs for both sports). Many companies and events (like the Olympics) use bundling as a way to help underfunded offerings get more distribution and customers.
4. Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the NCAA designed a perfect system to achieve the results they produced – which was significantly under-funding certain women’s sports relative to the higher revenue generating male equivalent sports. When you read the Phase II report, many of their recommendations focus on changing the mindset, processes and people who make the key decisions about these sports. It was quite evident that there has been no incentive for the NCAA to prioritize gender-equity allocation of resources, investments and media attention. Since there was no incentive, their only goal appears to have been “profit maximization” and that what was rewarded. However, NCAA is not just about making money, they are about promoting sports and student-athletes across all their sports – not just the ones that currently make the most money. In this case, introduce the sport to fans who already have an interest in men’s hockey.
5. Women’s Ice Hockey should have its own vision for where it wants to go by developing a “Grow the Game” Playbook
Women’s Ice Hockey shouldn’t depend on the NCAA to figure out the secret sauce for building a large, loyal fanbase. They need to take ownership for the success of their own sport themselves.
I have learned over the past year is that there is a wide range of marketing and social media savviness across the DI women’s college hockey programs. I am also assuming this translates into local marketing for their teams and building their fanbase – as seen by a wide range in attendance at regular season and playoff games (and obviously Covid has had a big impact in this stuff recently). But there should be some type of committee created (if there isn’t one already) that brings together some of the best practices from the most successful programs for selling the sport and putting on big women’s hockey events. These programs know their customers better than anyone else and should be leading the charge on what works and what doesn’t with this customer segment. With additional funding and proven, creative ideas the sport can really be taken to a new level.
In previous posts I have discussed attending showcases and camps which are scouted by college coaches. One of the key aspects of participating in these events is to recognize how they fit in to the end-to-end college recruiting process. Except for the rare exceptional player, attending any single event likely contributes only a fraction of the information involved in getting an offer from a school. As discussed many times before, each student-athletes recruiting journey is unique. However, this post serves as a general framework on defining the college athlete recruiting process. In addition, it attempts to provide context on tracking the process. Hopefully this information helps players and parents set reasonable expectations for what should happen depending on which stage of their journey they are in.
Awareness
How do coaches find and track potential student-athlete recruits? Here is a non-exhaustive list of sources for schools to add names to their recruiting database.
Top program rosters (e.g. hockey academy, prep school, top AAA club)
USA Nationals
USA Hockey national camp
In-season tournaments
Spring/summer showcases
College summer camps
Inbound email from player
Team website interest form
Coach referral
Research
How do teams scout and collect player information? How are players evaluated and rated?
Once a player is on a team’s radar, then they are researching the player to see if they might be a fit for their program. Here are the some of their primary sources of data gathering.
Watch livestream games (e.g. LiveBarn, HockeyTV)
Watch games in-person
Coach references (current, past, opposing team)
College summer camps
Public available data (social media, Elite Prospects, team/league websites, MyHockeyRankings)
Consideration
How do teams rank players and narrow their list for potential offers?
Assuming a players skill level meets a certain standard to be considered for a potential offer from the research phase, then additional information is also collected to be used in the decision-making process.
Past interactions (camps, showcases etc.)
Phone/Zoom/In-person conversations (interviews)
Virtual visits
Unofficial visits
Official visits
Prior to starting Champs App, my last company focused on the employee recruiting process. In particular, the interviewing stage for large companies. What is remarkably similar between job recruiting and college athlete recruiting is that that “hiring” organization wants to have as many “qualified” potential candidates in their recruiting pipeline before they make an offer. This gives them the school/company best opportunity to make an offer to the “best fit” candidate while realizing that the candidate, or student-athlete in this case, also has options and may choose to go somewhere else. Striking the balance between keeping potential recruits interested without any promise of an offer is a challenge that depends on creating a trusting relationship between both parties.
Offer
How do prospective student-athletes and school align their respective needs/interests with positional openings?
Number of openings; openings by position
Offer creation/discussion/negotiation:
Start year
Financial aid / scholarships (if available)
Expectations (role, depth chart)
Academic considerations
When it comes to the Offer stage of the college recruiting process, there are still many questions I have about how a final decision is made. In upcoming podcasts with college coaches, I will be asking the following questions.
Do you make offers to players, with an assumption that not all of them will accepts (i.e. expect a yield rate)? Or do you only make offers with a specific opening in mind, then go down the list when a player does not accept an offer?
What attributes are negotiable in an offer from a school?
Are conditional offers made which are dependent on academic requirements?
When I get the answers to these questions I will write up my findings in a follow-up post.
At the start of camp, Kristen Wright helped provide perspective on how to think about the bigger picture for what the week was about. The 15’s Camp is really just the first step in a USA Hockey player’s journey at the national level. For many it can be a multi-year process including their college years as the they try to be included in the conversation to make the National Women’s Team.
Realistically, in the short term, for most girls, the ultimate goal of attending any of the girls camps (15,16/18 or U18), is to be invited to the Women’s National Festival which includes players from all age groups (National Team, U23 and U18) being considered for a national roster.
However, for the week of camp, unless something truly exceptional occurred, this Covid year, there would be no decision on advancing or further outcome beyond the camp for any of the players in attendance. Everyone would just head back home richer from the experience and will go though a similar process next year to make the 2022 16/17s camp or if they we one of the top players, potentially go directly to the U18’s camp.
Given the above, what did I think were the objectives for the camp from a USA Hockey perspective?
Learn about the USA Hockey national program for girls/women and understand what it takes to compete and potentially make a national team (U18, U23, Women’s National Team)
Get seen & scouted by USA Hockey Coaches (to help get on the radar for the U18 Camp for 2022)
Get feedback on strengths and development opportunities
Get a benchmark of how good a player is relative to their peer group
1. Learn about the USA Hockey National Program
During the parent meeting, Kristen Wright shared the three core values of the USA Hockey program:
Relentless
Pride
Together
And from what I could sense as an outside observer, all the activities for the week centered around these principles. In addition, the theme of the week focused more on helping players be the best they can be rather than solely focus on what it would take to make any of the different age-specific national teams. Given the size of the camp, on balance, that seemed like a more realistic focus. Better to focus on the values that players would need to consistently demonstrate to make a team rather than hockey-specific attributes that may not resonate at this time for most of the girls.
2. Get seen & scouted by USA Hockey Coaches
As mentioned in my previous post, the on-ice coach to player ratio was about 1:3 with somewhere in the range of 70-100 USA Hockey representatives participating in the camp. I am assuming that USA Hockey leadership had some type of scouting information collection capability from both on-ice and off-ice observers at both games and practices. In addition, team coaches, team leaders and interns all got to observe their players both at the rink and outside of the rink during the week of camp. Given all these points of data, I would expect that there is some type of player tracking tool with a summary of the information that was collected on each player. There must be some type of report card (beyond the testing results) that was being kept on each player. Ideally, this database would be used to benchmark players if they return to another USA Hockey camp.
As Kristen Wright alluded to the parents on the first afternoon, roughly speaking players are group into A’s (Top 25 or Top 50), B’s (the next ~100) and C’s (the lowest ~75 players). However, the messaging was clear, it really shouldn’t matter right now for players to hear what level they were evaluated. The girls were there to learn about what it took to make it to the next level in USA Hockey and they need to take those learnings and go back and work hard and get better for next year. This year’s evaluations would primarily be used as a way to track development and improvement in a year from now.
3. Get feedback on strengths and development opportunities
Each player received some type of feedback from one of their coaches during the week. Depending on the team and coach, the feedback session occurred during the second half of camp and was a 1-on-1 meeting with one of the two team coaches. Since I was not a player, I could only gather information indirect accounts from players or parents, so my sample size may not be big enough. Evaluation was almost entirely qualitative than quantitative. However, the one consistent theme I heard was that the feedback session wasn’t that great. Comments ranged from advice being too generic (e.g. “go back home work hard, get better and come back and show us what you can do next year”) to not offering any real thoughtful insights to putting the onus on the player to self-evaluate and then mostly agreeing with the player’s evaluation. The consistent theme that I heard was that not enough effort was put into preparing for the feedback session.
In my opinion, this was an area that is an area that the camp could have had a bigger impact.
My personal thoughts are there should be some type of formal feedback process. Ideally with a standardize report card by position (goalie, defense, winger, center). Each player should have received written, detailed feedback on their strengths and key development opportunities (e.g. 3 for each) to help take their game to the next level (which would be personalized to the appropriate for that individual player). I realize this is a tremendous amount of work, requires a lot of coordination between all the coaches and has some pretty significant risks if not properly implemented. And I agree 100% with Kristen Wright the goal is build and maintain player confidence is key. However, given how much players and parents are invested (in every sense of the word) in their hockey development, having some type of tangible, standardized evaluation would be invaluable for these players. To be clear, I thought the week was exceptionally well-run and a great experience for all involved, but this was my one disappointment as a parent.
Since we didn’t get that feedback, I ended up doing it myself using footage from the games available via HockeyTV. I’ve started break down the video and comparing them to the top players from the U18 camp who made the National Festival. Most parents probably won’t do this level of video analysis, so there will be a gap in direction for many of the players. It’s disappointing that not all the girls will get a deep dive on their performance.
4. Get a benchmark of how good a player is relative to their peer group
My impression was that while the standard deviation at the 15’s Camp was much smaller than at Pacific District camp (where the gap from top to bottom was pretty significant) you could still see big differences from the elite players to some of the marginal players. Depending on the cohesiveness of the team, it was apparent where some players focused more on showcasing their individual talents rather than trusting their teammates and playing as a team. It was great to see multiple passes between teammates being well-executed to create scoring chances. However, in many games missed passes and turnover-after-turnover was occurring on a frequent basis, especially for the first couple of games.
One thing that really stood out to me quite frequently after I saw a player make a great play and I would then look-up where they were from, was how often they were a Minnesota High School player from a school I had never heard of. It was the first time I saw first-hand the high level of players produced by Minnesota hockey on the girls side of things.
In terms of benchmarking, if a player was observant of their teammates, they could pretty easily see which ones were more effective than others (and why). And they could also see the ones who either struggled on the skills side of things (e.g. skating, passing, positional play) or playing a team game. This was on the skater side of things. Since I am no expert on goalies, I am not sure how puck-stoppers would self-evaluate relative to their peers, but hopefully they could see the wide range of styles and abilities that different goalies demonstrated during the goalie-specific sessions.
These were my observations from the USA Hockey U15s girls camp and how I thought it met the objectives for the week from a USA Hockey perspective. While I wished there was a little more direction on the path to USA Hockey success, I fully understand why this is still the top of player funnel from a national team point-of-view.
In the final post about the 15s Girls camp, I will discuss the camp from a college recruiting perspective.
In May, 2019, the NCAA introduced new recruiting rules which restricted college recruiting to only allow verbal commitments to start August 1st of a player’s Junior year. This fundamentally changed the timeline for women’s college hockey recruits. We looked at almost 550 Division I college hockey commitment dates that are posted on the College Hockey Inc’s women’s college hockey commits web page. As you can see, the impact of the new rule has been dramatic.
Some interesting insights:
Five prominent schools (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dartmouth, Princeton, Clarkson) have not had any publicly announced commitments since the new NCAA rules were implemented in May, 2019
The days-before-starting-school commitment days have been halved since the new NCAA recruiting rules were implements (1113 before, 553 after). Which essentially means the average player’s commitment has moved from mid-February of their Junior Year, to Mid-August of Sophomore Year
Before the new rules were implemented, Wisconsin women’s hockey players committed on average 4 years prior to starting at U of W
Currently, only 5 school average less than a year for their commits – 294 days (St. Lawrence University, RIT, Sacred Heart University, Post University Lindenwood University)
Now: Here are the Top 10 schools that are the most aggressive to sign recruits (since the new rules were implemented):
Before: Top 10 School who used to sign the earliest commits prior to the rule changes:
If you want to know which girl’s hockey clubs or schools produce the most DI women’s college hockey commits, here is your answer:
We looked at 526 college hockey commits that are posted on the College Hockey Inc’s women’s college hockey commits web page starting with the 2020 academic year and beyond. There were 94 programs that produced at least 2 DI commits, but the Top 25 represented about 50% of all the commits. And the Top 50 represented about 75% of all the committed players. So, while there is a long tail of places a player can come from, the significant majority are recruited from some of the most well-known girls hockey organizations.
As a parent of a 14-year old girl hockey player who has only played with boys, we are trying to figure out her best path to playing Division I college hockey. However, there is no playbook that is given to parents or players on how follow the process. In fact, from talking to several coaches, each player’s journey is unique. However, if you live in a non-traditional girl’s hockey market like we do, the route can be even more complex.
As we look to decide when and where she play girls hockey for both development and recruiting purposes, I thought I would see what data already exists to help guide our decisions.
Insight #1 – Less than 0.3% of Women’s College Hockey Commits only played boys hockey
In my research, I have only found two female players who only played on boys teams for their club or school teams prior to college. And this is after looking into about 1000 Division I college players or commits. Those two players were Dominique Petrie, who only played AAA Boys hockey in California before attending Harvard. And a goalie from Alaska, Hannah Hogenson prior to attending Bemidji State.
Additional Questions to be Answered
In my upcoming posts I will answering the following questions:
Before these posts are published, I want to make sure the sources of the information are documented and the limitations of the data is clearly defined.
Secondary information is from Elite Prospects which was used to supplement missing club/school information for some players.
The period covers 8/20/16 until 10/21/20 for players who are committed for the 2020 season and later.
Data Integrity:
The data on Women’s College Commits website may not be complete and likely does not include all D1 commits
If a team/club was not listed, I referenced eliteprospects.com for additional information. Thank you to Beau Marchwick who populates most of the girls hockey data and stats.
A player’s designated club/school is chosen based on the commitment date. If a player played on both a school and a club team, then the club or school with which the player was playing on longer was selected (because they were responsible for developing the player for a longer period of time).
For time period calculations, we assumed Sept. 1st as the start of the college academic year to calculate the number of days from the date of commitment.
The analysis does not include any U.S. Division III or Canadian University Sports commits.
Top 10 Podcasts for Girl Hockey Players (and their Parents)
Kudos to multi-sport athlete Finley Frechette for creating this show about the Cornell Women’s Ice Hockey team. Starting a podcast is no simple task, especially when you have school and hockey to deal with already. What I love about this podcast is that Finley explores what life is like as a current women’s college hockey player both on and off the ice and around campus. By listening to the shows, you get a good insight into living in Ithaca as a student-athlete.
My favorite episode was when Finley interviewed one of the team’s super-fans, Casandra Moisanu, who is also a member of the band. Cassandra talks about her dedication to the Big Red team both at home and at away games. The first episode of the new hockey season just released this week, with the new players being introduced and sharing a little about themselves. Best of luck to Finley and her teammates for the upcoming season (hopefully it will start soon).
Top 10 Podcasts for Girl Hockey Players and their Parents
Lyndsey Fry Hockey Audio Experience Podcast
As someone who has a daughter playing hockey in a non-traditional hockey market, it is great to hear about Lyndsey Fry’s journey from Arizona to Harvard to the U.S. Olympic team. In addition, she is now committed to developing the next generation of girl hockey players on the west coast by leading the Arizona Kachina’s hockey program as well as her travelling hockey camps to underserved girl hockey markets. Her conversations with former teammates and other coaches dedicated to developing women’s hockey in non-traditional markets is really great to listen for someone like me.
The episodes of Lyndsey’s experience in travelling at a young age to Colorado to play youth hockey and then process of making the 2014 Olympic team are great listens. I don’t usually listen to the podcasts more than once, but there are a couple of her shows that are on that short list of repeat plays. Candidly, Lindsey’s podcast would be higher on this list if she just published more of them :).
