Like nearly everything else in this crazy year, the evaluation process for the team that will represent the United States at the 2021 World Junior Championship will be different.
Not drastically different, for sure, but not quite the same as in previous years, either.
In a normal year, USA Hockey would have held a camp in August for prospective WJC players and made decisions on much of the team. Then starting this month they would be out scouting players for the rest of the lineup before settling on the final roster in December.
Not this season. The camp was postponed until next week. The colleges and juniors haven’t started and won’t for some time.
As a result, the U.S. National Junior Team Evaluation Camp, now scheduled for Oct. 8-15 in Plymouth, Mich., takes on added importance.
“The big thing to accomplish is to evaluate the players because the college season and the major junior seasons will just be ramping up when it's time to select the team,’’ said Providence College’s Nate Leaman, the head coach of the U.S. team.
“This camp is a prime opportunity. There's going to have to be a lot of decisions made out of this camp. It’s really important. Normally the summer camp would be kind of just a time to get to know the players and evaluate the pool of players. But this year having this camp is really crucial to the selection of the team.’’
Understandably, on-ice sessions in Michigan will be closed to scouts, media and fans.
“Everyone is bringing negative tests with them, and then we'll be following a protocol at camp,’’ Leaman said.
“Obviously, it's a different year. You've got to remain flexible all the time. There's not going to be fans (at the tournament in Edmonton). You're going to be in a bubble. Even with the college season, everybody's got to be flexible.’’
LIU ready to roll
A mere five months after Long Island University announced that it was starting a Division 1 program, its players are on the ice and getting ready for the school’s inaugural season.
Even without a staff until very recently, coach Brett Riley (South Hamilton, Mass.) put together a roster of 26 players. Since Monday, they’ve been on the ice in small groups at the Northwell Health Ice Center, not far from campus.
While the Sharks’ schedule is a work in progress, Riley said he expects to play more than 20 games against Division 1 opponents.
He was well down the road toward building a schedule early in the summer, but had to go back to square one because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
LIU was working on a scheduling agreement with Hockey East, but that fell by the wayside as it appears that Hockey East will play only conference games.
“It was disappointing because we had a great schedule. But it is what it is,’’ he said.
The 29-year-old Riley, the youngest Division 1 head coach in the country, said he expects to play Quinnipiac, Arizona State and most of the teams in Atlantic Hockey.
“I’m excited. We’ve got really good kids. They’re hungry to prove something and we’ll see where it goes,’’ he said.
Harvard hammered
Harvard, the first school to pull the plug on the rest of the 2019-20 season when the COVID pandemic hit back in March, has been decimated by early departures like no other Division 1 program.
Three of its top players — juniors-to-be Jack Rathbone and Jack Drury and rising senior Reilly Walsh — left school to sign pro contracts.
Jack Badini and Henry Bowlby, both of whom would have been seniors, also turned pro.
In addition, Harvard’s strong freshmen class took a big hit when top commit Matthew Beniers — perhaps fearing that the Crimson might not play this season, his draft year — changed his mind and headed to Michigan instead.
Who knows, maybe Rathbone, Drury, Walsh, Badini or Bowlby would have left regardless of the pandemic. But if most or all of them had stayed, and Beniers had arrived as expected, the Crimson would have had the makings of a Frozen Four team.
Now that the damage is done, you can’t blame head coach Ted Donato and assistants James Marcou and Jim Tortorella for wondering what might have been.
“As a group we were really excited about what we might be able to accomplish,’’ said Donato. “The whole mix of the group, we had some young guys in some really key situations (last season). The recruiting class coming in was also very exciting. To see how that was going to mix in and see what kind of team we had, that’s part of the frustration for everybody involved.’’
Of course, early departures are a fact of life, pandemic or no pandemic.
“I have strong feelings on what a college education means, particularly from a place like Harvard. I’m more than happy when a guy realizes his dream of playing in the National Hockey League. There’s a balance to when’s the best time to make those big decisions,’’ said Dedham, Mass., native Donato, a Harvard alum who went on to play more than 800 regular-season and playoff games in the NHL.
“I don’t always agree with certain decisions, but I feel like I try to point out the values on both sides as clearly as I could. The reality is, we sit here today and I can’t say that anybody has any clearer understanding of what the hockey season might look like.
The waiting game
You can hear the frustration in Peter Belisle’s voice as he nears the three-month mark of his indefinite furlough from his job as head coach at UMass Boston.
The school, which is holding online classes only this fall, canceled fall sports months ago and moved the start of the winter sports season, if there is one, back to Jan. 1.
As of this week, Belisle said, there has been no update on the fate of the winter season.
“We’ve heard crickets. Nothing at all. No news,” said Belisle, who has been at UMass Boston for 14 seasons.
“I get it. It’s Boston. We’re a school of 15,000 kids. There’s only 10 buildings on campus. It’s pretty tough to do a hybrid, social distancing school model at our place. You can’t.’’
He’d still like to find room for athletics this winter, however.
Hockey is being played in Massachusetts, but only under modified rules that include no checking, distancing on faceoffs and quick whistles to avoid prolonged scrums. Belisle would consider playing under those rules if it’s the only way to get schools such as UMass Boston back on the ice.
“I’d sign up for Division 3, no-check hockey if they’d let the kids play. Play women’s rules? OK, we’ll do it. I’d vote yes all day long,’’ he said.
Sun Belt success
Miami University alumnus Blake Coleman of the Tampa Bay Lighting on Monday became the first Texas-born-and-raised player to hoist the Stanley Cup.
What, if anything, does the first Cup final between Sun Belt teams mean for college hockey down the road?
Interest in the Stanley Cup Final should boost the number of kids playing hockey in Florida and Texas. In time, some of those kids could develop into Division 1 players, as did Coleman, who was 7 years old and a devoted Dallas Stars fan when they won the Cup in 1999.
“You tend to see the biggest growth following something like this at the U-8 level, so you're talking about more than 10 years before we see them in college,’’ said Nate Ewell, deputy executive director of College Hockey Inc.
There already has been significant growth in the number of Division 1 players from Florida and Texas in the past couple of decades.
In 2003, the first year for which numbers are available, there were just two Division 1 players from Florida and four from Texas.
In 2019-20, there were 26 Division I1 players from Florida and 19 from Texas. And the invite list to USA Hockey’s National Junior Evaluation Camp next week includes two Texas-born players.
