A coach and a team are only as good as their players. This is true in a lot of ways and really emphasizes the importance of recruiting. Hockey is unique in a lot of ways, but recruiting to Division III hockey is one of the biggest ways that we are different from other sports. In this blog I will talk about the differences of recruiting to Division III college hockey and then I will talk about how we are recruiting during this crazy time.
There are three ways that hockey recruiting is different than recruiting in other sports. Those three differences are the age of the recruits with the aspect of junior hockey, the landscape of the recruiting world, and finally, the decision-making timeline is much later.
The age of the recruits and recruiting junior hockey players is unique to hockey. SJU hockey currently has two players on the team that do not have junior-hockey experience. Joe Raleigh came to SJU from Stillwater High School and Jerome Newhouse went right to school after graduating from Benilde-St. Margaret’s. SJU currently has 15 players that played in the North American Hockey League (NAHL), seven players that played in North American Tier 3 Hockey League (NA3HL), two players that played junior hockey in Canada, and two others that played in other leagues. Many of the players that we recruit have lived away from home for 2-3 years before coming to SJU. These aspects pose questions like, where am I going to live? Who am I going to live with? The presence of junior hockey also leads to the second difference in the distance traveled to find these players.
We have players on our team that played in Alaska, Utah, Texas, New York, British Columbia, Minnesota, and others. Don’t get me wrong, most of our players are from Minnesota, but those recruits still go out to play hockey all over North America. During the season we (I should say Cory Thorson) goes from Texas to Boston, to the middle of Manitoba, and to Cloquet to watch these players. We do our best not to spin our wheels in the recruiting of student-athletes, but it is hard not to with the amount of ground we must cover.
The third difference is the timing of these players and their decisions to commit to schools. The process often goes well into May as the junior seasons are usually finishing up in mid to late May. The players that we are recruiting usually have Division I aspirations and they are waiting out till the last minute to commit to a Division III school. Most of the players have their schools narrowed down to 3-5 schools and make their final decision once their junior seasons end. The general process includes making contact and trying to get them on campus in September before they head off to their junior teams, then track them and watch them throughout their seasons, and finally bring them in for the final overnight visit to seal the deal. That last visit is usually the closing time for these top recruits and this pandemic has really put a strain on getting these players to commit without that final visit.
Because of the pandemic that we are all going through the process of finalizing the recruiting class has been difficult. Instead of the final, in-person/overnight visit, we are trying to get recruits to talk to players over the phone and to get them to do a virtual visit. The admissions office has done their best to put together some cool ways to visit campus without visiting campus in person. You can see some of those aspects through the links below. At first, I really thought that this pandemic was going to speed up the decision process, but I have found it to slow down because these student-athletes are holding on to the thought of taking some final visits to school. Fortunately, I have had a lot of them on campus in the past and feel that will give us a little advantage in those decisions.
Here are the links to the virtual visits.
SJU Aerial - 2020 SJU Aerial Tour – YouTube
CSB aerial - 2020 CSB Aerial Tour – YouTube
Virtual Tour - http://go.twocolleges.com/tour/
Admissions Videos - https://www.csbsju.edu/admission/videos
SJU Athletics Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0u8tx3dOFM
With all this said, I feel we are fortunate that we only graduated four seniors this season, so our recruiting class is not huge. We are still working on a few good recruits and I look forward to updating everyone in a blog soon as to the new freshman class joining the Johnnie family!
Thanks again for all the support and Go Johnnies!!
