Hockey is a special case. There’s such a different path for players between high school and college, with post-grad-HS and juniors. Most D1 coaches aren’t looking for players right out of HS. Are the Ivies?
Also, there’s the question of numbers in D1 hockey programs. One post said there are 60 D1 hockey programs, 100 D1 football programs and 300 D1 basketball programs. There are a lot of hockey players in the juniors aiming for those spots. Ivies could still have pretty good teams with the overflow.
They may also attract players that actually want to get a degree. Even getting drafted reasonably high is no guarantee of a pro career in hockey.
Just noting this is true for men’s hockey, not women’s.
Nope. It’s really difficult for those coming out of HS boys hockey to even be recruited for D3 varsity hockey. Most of those players also played juniors.
If you look at hockey rosters, you’ll find a lot of 20 year old freshmen on the teams, either because they’ve been playing juniors, to a PG year at a prep school, or just were older than the average 18 year old hs grad. One of the guys I went to hs with who played hockey turned 16 in Sept of our freshman year (and got his driver’s license!). His Sept birthday was after the cut off for K, and he (like many boys in our school system) repeated 3rd grade.
Joe Pavelski (Sharks and Stars) did play at this same high school (his dad played on the same teams as my classmates) and then directly to U of Wisconsin, and then to NHL, so it can be done.
Pavelski played two years in the USHL before he enrolled in Wisconsin (he left HS after his junior year.) A relatively high proportion of USHL players are drafted, many make it to the NHL.
I think he went back and forth in high school. He won a state championship in 2002 with the high school and then graduated from Wisconsin in 2006 (at least that’s the timeline I saw), so I figured he did both at the same time.
A friend of my brother did that, went to Detroit to play for a year or two but always came back to finish out the school year at the high school. To make his life even more complicated, he sometimes went to the Catholic hs but played hockey at the public hs.