USA Hockey’s new Development League is the biggest structural change to American youth hockey in over a decade. It’s the third of three big swings by USA Hockey after creating the NTDP in the late 90’s and the ADM in the late 2000’s. Both of those were huge successes and USA Hockey is banking on this new league being the third.
The DL looks to create a clearer path for the country’s best midget hockey players but also raises hard questions that every Tier 1 club operator, coach, and hockey parent should be asking right now.
I am cautiously optimistic about it, but as with anything as big as this, nothing is perfect and there are pros and cons. So let’s walk through why the DL exists, what it could do, and where it could potentially have some obstacles.
Why USA Hockey did it
The short answer: Tier 1 hockey has gotten out of control. What was supposed to be the top of the pyramid has become disjointed and watered down. There are more “elite” teams than there are elite players, and families have a hard time telling which programs actually deliver high-performance development and which just carry the label.
The second reason for the league is the new flow of top American players to the CHL. USA Hockey wants to slow that down and the DL is an attempt to get its players under one roof to educate them and their families earlier on the pros of playing junior hockey in the US – which is still a great option despite the influx of players going up north.
This helps them control the narrative with their top players, educating them on the USHL which has been a league that over the past few decades has done a phenomenal job getting kids ready for college hockey and beyond. The NCAA rule allowing CHL players to play college hockey has thrown a huge wrench into the entire landscape, and this league is a solution to that seismic shift for the American player.
What is the DL?
The DL is a league of 29 teams as of now, selected by a committee created by USA Hockey, competing at two age levels – 15U and 17U (DL organizations may not field a 16u team). Some characteristics of the basic structure include:
- Schedule: Maximum 55 games per season, with a minimum of 60% of them against other DL teams.
- Postseason: The DL crowns its own champions. DL teams do not go to USA Hockey Nationals.
- Roster format: Each team will have a limit of 22 players, with restrictions to the amount of underagers you can have per team.
- Game format: One game per day, rather than the multi-game weekends families are used to.
- Girls Hockey: The DL will be for the boys side only.
- Relationship to Tier 1: The DL is designed to work alongside Tier 1, not replace it. The remaining 40% of the schedule could be against other Tier 1 organizations not in the league, but time will tell if and how DL teams will choose to schedule games against those organizations. USA Hockey does not determine scheduling, that is for each team to decide how to play their games.
On paper, it is a smaller, more concentrated top tier sitting on top of the existing Tier 1 structure – with hopes that the DL and Tier 1 work together to create a healthier and more predictable ecosystem.
What it could do
If it works, the DL could fix some real problems we see at that level.
A clearer pipeline for top players. Right now, the path for a truly high-performance player is confusing. The DL gives the best players best-on-best competition in one understandable place. If you talk to most people in Tier 1 hockey, they’ll tell you AAA hockey right now is a mess that needs a correction.
Keeping players in the States. With the best players concentrated in one league, USA Hockey has a direct line to educate them and their families about the American development path and the USHL before the CHL comes calling.
Development standards at the top of the pyramid. Now there can be a clear, shared definition of what high-performance development should look like for this level of hockey before players matriculate to junior hockey. I’m not exactly sure what all those standards are or how it will be enforced, but this is supposed to be a big part of the infrastructure of the new league. Examples could include strength and conditioning programs, mental performance resources, coaching education, and more.
Flexibility between the DL and USHL. The new league can allow for a more seamless transition into the USHL for young players. It will make it easier for kids to play a game or two, or more, up with the team that drafted them which can help them understand the nature of the league and how hard it can be. The transition from midget to junior is the hardest transition for a player of any level – and this could help decrease the friction when they go up.
A rising tide. One hopeful argument that USA Hockey is making is that the DL will raise all boats. If the top tier sets a higher bar, every other Tier 1 program will have a model to look to in raising its own standards lifting everyone up.
The risks
There are a lot of open questions, and most of them we’ll have to wait and see how things shake out to see its real effect.
No residency rules. Without them, does the DL become even more of the wild west? Academies with brick-and-mortar schools and dorms have always recruited nationally. But there’s been a real uptick recently on local Tier 1 programs looking far and wide for talent.
Whether it’s for cost, development, or exposure, elite players from non-traditional areas have typically started to move away from home at DL ages. However, my fear is we’ll see kids who don’t need to move away from home do so because of the recruiting pressure put on them to seek out alternative options.
Will DL teams create GM or director of player personnel positions and recruit from all over with a mandate from an owner to attract the most talent? Or will DL teams focus on developing home-grown players that grew up in their organization or area?
No residency rules may create an even more disruptive recruiting environment leading to more FOMO (which is already one of the biggest issues in youth sports) and unnecessary changes of addresses for kids.
Costs. Basic economics tells us that when supply shrinks and demand holds steady, prices go up. That is the setup the DL could potentially create. There are now far fewer elite teams, but just as many families who want a spot on one.
To be fair, fewer elite teams isn’t a bad thing. A watered-down Tier 1 landscape is one of the biggest criticisms of the current system, and the DL is a direct answer to it. But scarcity has a price, and families should be asking what it will cost to compete for one of those spots.
Add online schooling (which I’m guessing is going to increase), more travel, exclusivity, billeting fees, and the price of being a top player could go up fast. Hockey at this level is already entirely too expensive – and the chances of prices going up even more I’d put pretty high. It’s on the DL operators to determine costs as there are no guardrails from USA Hockey I’m aware of. How they maneuver on costs in the new marketplace is something I and many others will be watching closely.
What happens to the Tier 1 organizations that didn’t get chosen. Picking 29 teams by committee out of the 80 or so that applied means a lot of Tier 1 organizations were not picked. What happens next? Will some of them walk away from the Tier 1 structure entirely? Will DL teams play nice in the sand with these organizations – and vice versa?
This is a very real question that could have a real positive or negative effect on the Tier 1 hockey ecosystem. Only 60% of the games for DL teams are required to be against other DL clubs, but will DL clubs want to schedule games against other Tier 1 clubs in their area? USA Hockey has clearly stated that they want collaboration between the DL and other Tier 1 operators. Whether or not that collaboration happens remains to be seen.
The 15U player who doesn’t make 17U. No DL organization is permitted to have a 16u team. So what happens to a 15u DL player that is not good enough to be a first-year player for their organization’s 17u team the following year?
Where do they land? Talking to some people, options would be a 16u team with another non-DL Tier 1 organization in their area, a 17u team at a different DL organization, or the 18u team within their organization (which more than likely will not be as good as the 17u DL team). Especially in markets with only one DL team – this could be really tough for the cohort of 16u aged kids.
The recruiting window. In the new league, the legal recruiting period starts January 15th for organizations to sign players within their own organization for the next year. Then on February 1st, there’s an open signing period for anyone throughout the country through the month of February. There’s then a signing dead period until the end of the National Championships before a restart of recruiting 48 hours after.
Bluntly – what happens to a kid and family who is not recruited back to their own organization in January? While other kids on the team are being offered spots, and they’re not, how does that play out for the culture of the team the rest of the year?
And then what happens in February for those kids and families when it’s open season and the organization is signing kids to take your spot from outside of the program?
This has potential to get toxic. The one spot I know has similar guidelines is Massachusetts, where you can legally have players from other clubs come to your practices to be evaluated during the season. People there call it “mating season”. And if you talk to anyone out that way…it is toxic. Being a bubble player on a team, not receiving a contract with your program for next year, and watching your team sign a bunch of kids after not earning one yourself – that’s a tough spot to be in.
I understand that this stuff is going on anyways, just not out in the open. I understand that this is a way for programs to compete with academies who recruit from all over, evening the playing field. I just also see the potential pitfalls of these recruiting periods and it could get ugly.
Late maturing athletes. If you look at any research on athlete development, it will tell you that all sports are terrible at identifying talent early. With that, hockey was great because junior hockey gave kids a bigger runway before going to college. Previously with the average freshman at 20 years old, it allowed for late maturing players to have a better shot to achieve that level by taking the marathon over sprint approach to development.
A narrower top tier at 15U risks locking in early bloomers and leaving late developers on the outside. That’s not to say that a later maturing kid can’t get cut at 15 and then make a 17 team later. With the top 16- and 17-year-olds probably playing junior hockey, it opens up spots on those 17u rosters.
But between the new college rule with your eligibility clock starting at 19 and now this new league – do they hurt the late maturing player’s chances – which have been a staple of why our sport has been so great developing players for professional hockey through the college hockey system.
The trickle-down craziness. When a decision is made at one level, there’s typically a trickle-down effect on levels underneath. Case in point – part of why the DL was created was due to rule changes at the college level. Going back further, think of when the NHL made its rule changes in the mid-2000s to emphasize speed and skill. It led to a transformation in coaching and how the game was played at all levels below that we still see today.
So with the DL coming into the picture, I’m wondering how it’s going to affect player movement at 12/13/14u? Will there be a significant push to get in these DL organizations earlier and earlier? And how young will the jockeying get? It has potential to create “haves” and “have nots” at really young ages, exacerbating the problem of professionalizing kids too early.
What other markets are doing
Responses so far are uneven. Minnesota has already put out its plan, and it’s incredible. It’s a model honestly a lot of the other bigger traditional markets should try and emulate, especially Boston. But as far as I know, they are the only place that has come together to reveal a path forward. We had Mike MacMillan of USA Hockey and Minnesota Hockey on the podcast to detail it.
Here’s what I believe to be true when thinking of other areas of the country:
We say this all the time on our podcast – hockey will be better if there’s collaboration between stakeholders rather than resentment. Love it or hate it, the DL is here to stay. For it to work, there needs to be a level of cooperation and partnership to potentially reshape each area around the country. Whether you’re in a major market or a non-traditional market, leaders need to come together to find solutions to the intended and unintended positive and negative consequences that will follow the creation of the DL.
I’ve been very vocal about my thoughts towards Minnesota and how they continue to lead the way in so many areas including the development of elite players on both the men’s and women’s sides. Their community model is a part of it, but their ability to put egos aside, collaborate, and put the kids first in shaping their model is where the secret sauce lies. I wrote all about it last year.
On our podcast years ago, Bob Mancini, one of the architects of the new DL along with the ADM and NTDP, said something that really stuck with me. It’s that we need to have “competition on the ice, and cooperation off the ice.” Minnesota does this better than anyone, with many other markets unfortunately being the opposite – where we see more competition between adults than collaboration off the ice. With the new DL, cooperation and collaboration is more important than ever.
Where this goes
USA Hockey has set much of the structure and parameters, and now the DL will go wherever the Tier 1 club operators take it. The clubs will ultimately decide whether it becomes a true development pipeline or just a more expensive, more fragmented label.
The schedule and travel. The costs. The recruiting landscape. The collaboration between DL and Tier 1 programs that were not selected. The development and resources put into it. USA Hockey laid much of it out, and now the actions of the Tier 1 hockey world will tell us where this is going.
For more non-traditional markets, it will probably be more business as usual. They are used to the higher costs, having to travel a lot, having fewer Tier 1 programs in their area, and their kids being recruited at this age to other programs around the country.
For the more traditional and bigger markets, there will be much more of an effect on what I laid out above. Will DL teams in these more traditional areas schedule games against other Tier 1 organizations that did not get selected to the league, limiting costs of travel? Will they recruit nationally or will they focus on home-grown talent? Will they adhere to recruiting rules or use them as guidelines?
I know a lot of the leaders of the organizations selected and have the utmost respect for them. They’re good people who care about the kids and their experience. But I’ve also worked in a major market Tier 1 environment and there is no doubt a pressure to win. Will that pressure get even higher leading to more of the craziness this league is attempting to curb? Time will tell.
Final Thoughts
I applaud the leaders at USA Hockey for taking action to find solutions to the disjointed Tier 1 landscape and the realities to the new CHL/NCAA rules. I also applaud their collaborative approach with their committee seeking input from many stakeholders in the hockey world.
As I stated earlier, there was no perfect solution. There are plenty of aspects to this that scare me, particularly with costs and where the recruiting landscape goes. Youth hockey is a business, and business interests can get in the way of development interests. My hope is this league will help restrain the businessification of our game and our kids, but it very well could add fuel to that fire.
This is a big swing from USA Hockey at the top of our development pyramid, and if leaders can collaborate as a community to move it forward I think big things could be ahead. If ego and money get in the way, it could intensify the issues this league was meant to solve.
I’m choosing to be optimistic. I’m looking forward to seeing how all of this shakes out, and the recruiting period starting in January will be a really good look into the window of where it goes.
If you’d like to know more detailed information about the new league, here is the league’s website: https://www.usahockey.com/developmentleague
And here is the Youtube selection show where two of the architects of the league, Scott Paluch and Bob Mancini, provide their insight into the creation of the DL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqYtdauuRYA
