The Escalating College Hockey Arms Race

From: USCHO.com
by Gerald Skoning

The rosters of Division I college hockey teams consist almost entirely of players who have spent a year or two playing for “junior” hockey clubs. Only a very few players on these Division I clubs have entered college directly out of high school. As a result, the quality of college hockey has been enhanced, but this improvement has had a negative impact on the “student” part of the vaunted student-athlete experience.

The mother of a freshman hockey star for an ECAC team candidly expressed her dismay after watching her son’s team lose to another perennial ECAC powerhouse by a score of 3-2. Her concern wasn’t over the team’s loss on the ice, but rather over her son’s academic difficulties.

I had asked her how he was doing in the classroom his first term in college. She sighed, “Unfortunately, he’s really struggling. He was an ‘A’ student in high school, graduating near the top his class. We were so proud of his academic success. But, then he was away from the classroom for a whole year while he played 75 games in Juniors for the Flin Flon Bombers of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. He’s a better hockey player for it, but he is really rusty with the books.”

It’s a familiar story for many families of kids who aspire to Division I hockey. The rosters of most every Division I hockey program are filled with kids who played in Alberta (AJHL), Ontario (CJHL), Sioux City, Iowa (USHL), or British Columbia (BCHL). They range from 20- or 21-year-old freshmen to 24-year-old seniors who are stronger, faster, smarter and much older hockey players than those who just graduated from high school.

They play a year or two in juniors in the hopes of improving their recruitment opportunities and perhaps landing full-ride scholarships at one of the traditional college hockey powerhouses like North Dakota, Wisconsin, or Michigan. Most likely, their dreams also include a high NHL draft position, based in part on their experience in juniors.

Junior programs are a Canadian tradition as iconic as the Mounties or the Maple Leaf. Long before college hockey teams in the U.S. began recruiting heavily out of juniors, those programs attracted Canadian players with NHL aspirations. Juniors rivalries provided a live hockey entertainment alternative to the infamous “Hockey Night in Canada” broadcasts on CBC on long winter nights in small towns dotting the frozen tundra of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario.

Today, college hockey coaches love the junior programs. They recruit players who are battle-tested, and whose skills have been polished beyond the rough-edged talent seen in high school hockey. To college coaches, it’s like having a farm team system from which to draw a talented roster. College coaches regularly tell talented high school recruits to defer admission for a year or two for some seasoning and development in the juniors. A ready-made farm system.

Also, the pervasive junior program makes recruiting college hockey players much easier for coaches. Instead of screening hockey recruits from hundreds of high schools scattered across the United States and Canada, college hockey coaches have a ready-made, pre-screened pool of candidates. This cuts down on recruiting travel and expense … one-stop shopping in the USHL, AJHL, BCHL, and so on.

On so many levels this system is hard to argue with. Of course, parents love the juniors as well. To them, it may save the family a staggering tuition bill of up to $45 thousand per year. For them, delaying college for a year or even two is well worth the personal sacrifice their kids make in playing a 70- to 80-game season (or two) in remote regions of the Canadian wilderness.

The number of players on a college hockey roster who have come directly from high school has dwindled to a precious few. The two or three who do play varsity Division I hockey have become mere tokens, for all intents and purposes. But they are players for whom the academic challenges of higher education will be less daunting since they were enrolled in school the entire year before entering college.

How did we get to this point? When did this new, higher level of professionalism creep into the wonderful game of college hockey? Other major college sports like football, basketball and baseball have no such junior programs to groom their athletes. There are no “junior” football or basketball programs to develop and burnish young talent (although some may claim junior colleges occasionally serve that purpose). Yet the quality of play on college gridirons and basketball courts in the United States is remarkably strong. Why is ice hockey different?

Maybe it relates to the NHL aspirations of the hockey player or the hockey parents, or both. Or, perhaps it’s the lure of full-ride athletic scholarships that motivates the kids to make this enormous personal sacrifice.

One wonders if it is possible to “unring the bell” and return to recruitment of student-athletes for college hockey directly out of high school. Of course, no college hockey coach is likely to be the first unilaterally to spurn recruiting those hot junior hockey prospects. Such a move would be wildly unpopular with alumni, fans, current players looking for talented freshmen to bolster championship prospects, and students who long for a national championship.

A coach refusing to recruit junior hockey prospects would be as unpopular as a U.S. president deciding unilaterally to eliminate our country’s nuclear arsenal. The coach who unilaterally decides it’s important to the student-athlete to return to recruiting directly out of high school would be summarily fired and ridden out of town on a rail.

The issue is worthy of attention by the entire college hockey community. Colleges and universities that recruit predominantly from various junior hockey programs should recognize the academic sacrifices their recruiting practices perpetuate.

The NCAA should study the issue of the increasing dominance of junior hockey recruiting to determine whether it would be feasible to impose a uniform nationwide stand-down in this increasingly competitive juniors arms race, and return to recruiting athletes directly out of high school. This might go a long way toward putting the “student” back in the student-athlete equation.

Mr. Skoning is a Chicago attorney who specializes in labor and employment law. He was captain of the 1964 Princeton University hockey team (which did not win the Ivy League championship, as this year’s team did for the first time in 55 years). While attending the University of Michigan Law School, he was assistant captain of a team sponsored by Jiffy Mix Company, consisting of several Michigan players from their 1963 NCAA championship team. The Jiffy team, which played in the International Metro League based in Southern Ontario, won the Michigan State Amateur Championship in 1966 and the U.S. Amateur Championship in 1967. After service as an officer in the U.S. Navy, he played for 10 years with the Chicago Cardinals of the Continental Hockey League.

Pioneering Spirit Article On Tyler Ruegsegger

From: USCHO.com
Candace Horgan

DENVER (Oct. 31) — Midway through the second period of a game with Minnesota-Duluth early in their season, the Denver Pioneers were tied 1-1. The Pioneers, who missed qualifying for the 2006-2007 NCAA tournament by one win, have approached this season knowing how important every game is, especially in the ultra-competitive WCHA.

Right after Peter Mannino made a big save on a partial breakaway, sophomore assistant captain Tyler Ruegsegger spied his linemate, Rhett Rakhshani, grabbing the puck along the left side boards. As Rakhshani started to backhand it out of the zone, Ruegsegger sped out of the zone, trying to get a step on Duluth defenseman Evan Oberg.

As the puck landed in front of them, Ruegsegger and Oberg fought for position, skating through the neutral zone. Just as Ruegsegger got his stick on the puck, Oberg, falling down, hauled him down at the Duluth blue line.

Ruegsegger quickly popped to his feet while Oberg lay on the ice, took two strides to the left side circle and backhanded the puck to Anthony Maiani in the slot. Maiani fired it into the open net, sparking the Pioneers to a 5-1 victory.

It is this kind of singular, gritty effort that led Pioneers’ coach George Gwozdecky to name Ruegsegger an assistant captain in his sophomore season.

“I think how he plays, how he carries himself in the locker room, all scream of his tremendous leadership capabilities,” said Gwozdecky. “He’s an intelligent player who plays extremely hard, a difficult guy to play against. He’s not a real vocal individual, he’s not a guy that gets up and makes a lot of speeches, but just the way he lives his life, the importance that school and hockey have in his life, and how he carries himself, are a shining example for all of his teammates to follow.”

Ruegsegger, who grew up nearby in Lakewood, Colo., started playing hockey at age five, inspired in part by a cousin who had taken up the game. He played in the Arvada Hockey Association at first, then started playing in Littleton.

Ruegsegger, like many hockey players, was a two-sport athlete initially, playing baseball over the summer. However, at age 12, he started to concentrate entirely on hockey.

“I loved playing baseball growing up and at one point kind of had to choose between hockey and baseball, and hockey obviously won that. I started doing some summer teams, stuff like that, and you really couldn’t commit to both sports. [Hockey’s] just my passion; hockey’s the game I love. I love everything about it, the game, the speed, the quickness. Playing it’s fun and that’s probably why I chose it.”

Shortly after he started playing, the Avalanche moved to town from Quebec, and like many kids his age that had a big impact.

“I think when I started there was the Grizzlies, the IHL team,” said Ruegsegger. “They obviously had a big impact and then when the Avs came absolutely, no question, it made a big impact and increased hockey here. And obviously I grew up following Denver as well; we had season tickets for quite a while and I grew up wanting to play for them and then got the opportunity.”

As Ruegsegger approached high school age, he and his family realized that Colorado had limited hockey opportunities for teenagers, and if he wanted to step up to the next level, he would have to play somewhere else. After considering the USHL, Ruegsegger finally chose to attend Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Faribault, Minn.

“We were looking at prep schools, and academics have always been really important to me and Shattuck was a place that has great hockey, obviously, and great academics as well,” said Ruegsegger. “What also made it easy to choose Shattuck is that my mom, my sister and I moved there and my dad stayed here with his business; he’s got a business here, and he flew back and forth every weekend. So the fact that he could get back and forth every weekend was huge.”

Ruegsegger’s mother and sister Rebecca still live in Faribault; Rebecca is in 11th grade at Shattuck and plays goal for the girls’ prep team.

While at Shattuck, Ruegsegger competed with future North Dakota players Jonathan Toews, Chay Genoway, and Taylor Chorney, winning a national championship with them. While they never really tried hard to get him to go to North Dakota, playing against them, he says, is interesting.

“They knew I was from Colorado, so they knew I was always going to probably go to Denver if I had the chance. It’s always fun playing them though. It’s crazy, because you go out and you’re battling guys you won a national championship with. It (winning the national championship) was great, one of the best experiences of my life for sure. Not only the guys on the team that you get to play with and become friends with, they’re now your lifetime friends, but my coaches there, Tom Ward and Jon Austin were phenomenal coaches and phenomenal people too. I learned a lot that year about life and hockey.”

Ruegsegger had always wanted to play at Denver. However, according to Gwozdecky, it was the defection of Paul Stastny that brought him to Denver as a freshman last season.

“The original plan in recruiting him, when he decided to come to Denver, after he graduated from Shattuck he was going to play a year of Junior A hockey, with the River City Lancers in the United States Hockey League, and that was the plan right up until the spring of that year, when we realized that guys like Paul Stastny, there was a good chance of him moving.

“So, at that time, we changed our plan, and in a conversation with him and his father, we said, ‘We’d like you to come here, if you feel you’re ready,’ because we felt he was ready based on the improvement we had seen over the year, and it’s worked out extremely well.”

For Ruegsegger, coming to Denver was a dream come true, and, as sentimental as it sounds, just putting on the jersey is what he remembers most fondly from his first year.

“You know, coming in here it really was living a dream; just to have the opportunity each game to go out there and do that was something special. With the teammates, and the guys, the way I was treated as a freshman, that’s something I’ll remember my whole life. When I came in here as a freshman I just wanted to work as hard as I could. You know, when you do that, hopefully you get opportunities, and Coach has really blessed me with opportunities in the last year.”

During his first season, Gwozdecky came to rely on Ruegsegger’s playmaking and offensive capabilities. Ruegsegger finished fourth on the team in scoring last year, and midway through the season Gwozdecky moved him to the point on the first power-play unit, a position Ruegsegger had never played. However, Gwozdecky felt Ruegsegger’s skills made his move there an easy choice.

“Playing a position like that, especially right where he’s at, requires real good on-ice vision, the ability to make decisions under pressure from the opposing team, you have to be an excellent passer, and you have to be able to shoot the puck hard, and your catch and release skill has to be excellent. Those are all things that Tyler has.”

Asked about playing the point, Ruegsegger again stresses the team concept. “You know, I just came in one day to practice and that’s how it was set up. I like it. I like being back there with ‘Buts’ (Chris Butler). Anywhere on the power play I feel fine, but I’ve had some success doing it that way and no matter what, sometimes you change things up and if you get some success you go with it so it’s worked out well for us so far.”

Of course, the season ended in disappointment for the Pioneers, as they failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament. That the West Regional was held in Denver added to the feeling. With the Frozen Four in Denver this year, the team has set a goal of returning to the tournament.

“Last year, you know, the regionals were here and we weren’t able to make it and it was a terrible feeling, especially when it’s in your backyard, so this year that’s definitely one of our goals, to make the tournament and then if you get to the Frozen Four it’s a great opportunity for us.”

In his sophomore year, Ruegsegger has stepped up as a leader and a player. He currently centers the first line with Rakhshani and Maiani, and looks to help the freshmen, and his teammates, succeed in any way possible.

After any game, win or lose, Ruegsegger always talks about his teammates and the skills of the other team. It would seem like a cliché if he weren’t so sincere about his belief in team play, something Gwozdecky echoes when asked about how he decided to pair Ruegsegger with his current linemates.

“He makes everybody he plays with better; that might be the ultimate compliment you can pay any athlete, that no matter who you play them with, they make those people better, not only by how they play, but how hard they play, their skill level, their sincerity, and with Tyler, it’s all about team. It’s not about him, it’s about the team, and he plays so hard to help his teammates have success.”

Looking ahead to the rest of the season, Ruegsegger is excited about helping the large freshman class adjust to college hockey, and do anything possible to help his team reach the Frozen Four.

“I love the role I have this year, and I’m thankful for that role I have, and I want to use it to help the team out as best I can. Whether that’s getting goals or creating turnovers on the forecheck or making great defensive plays, it all plays a part. You can’t focus on one area or the other; you have to be a complete player to help the team win.”