Tucker Mears remembers those fall weekends well.
He would typically wake up in his dorm at Frederick Gunn on Saturday morning and head to a soccer game since the school required students to play a sport every season. If he were lucky, his father would make the eight-and-a-half-hour drive from Cleveland to be there and drive Mears to a place like New England Sports Center in Marlboro, Mass., or Foxboro Sports Center in Foxboro, Mass., for his Yale Jr. Bulldogs games on Saturday and Sunday. That came after soccer.
If his father wasn't there, it was on him to find a ride.
He rented a hotel Saturday night, before playing one or two more games on Sunday. Then, it was the two-hour drive back to Frederick Gunn to make dinner time. Sunday night study hall followed.
Things were even crazier for a showcase weekend. Games typically started on Friday, which meant Mears needed teachers to sign off on absences, and went through Sunday and sometimes into Monday.
"I had a lot of times I got back late on Sunday and not been able to get to study hall," Mears said. "I'd have to email my teachers, 'Can I get an extension?' It was very time-consuming."
Mears won't have that problem this fall.
Beginning this Saturday, the Cutting Edge Management (CEM) Fall Development League gets underway. It will open up a pathway for prep school hockey players to play more with their teammates and not have to commit to lengthy off-campus trips to play on split-season fall teams.
Participating teams are Frederick Gunn, Salisbury, Deerfield, Taft and Westminster. Frederick Gunn and Salisbury will have two teams. Schools like South Kent and Nichols will have their U18 teams playing, too.
Every school hosts a weekend slate of games. The plan is for a bus, provided by CEM, to bring players to and from the games — one on Saturday and one on Sunday. Each school will host a weekend, and since all are within a relatively short driving distance, players will go home right after the games.
"Parents and families are very, very excited about this option," Frederick Gunn head coach Craig Badger said. "Families very much want this."
Frederick Gunn has full buy-in from its players. The majority of players from other teams are in, too. Still, some will stay on their split-season fall team and play in at least 10 games to be eligible for nationals come March.
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"You have to put it into their perspective," Mears said. "You go from [younger] guys going from playing national-bound split-season, to having this big fall league introduced. You have these kids coming from top organizations, and they've been working to win a national title."
Not only does split-season hockey offer a chance at a national title, but the games and showcases are heavily scouted by NHL, junior hockey and college personnel.
"There's the initial hesitancy," Badger said. "Like, 'Well, I don't want to bail on U16 hockey if I don't know what the exposure is.'"
Badger and his fellow prep coaches can't roam these benches. Instead, local NESCAC coaches, NHL scouts, USHL scouts and QMJHL scouts will serve as coaches — and that means exposure.
"This league is about development, it's about exposure," Chad Levitt, the president of CEM, said. "And again, I really want to emphasize this: It's going to put the kids in a safe environment."
This new league does offer players, especially younger ones, a better transition into campus life at their prep school. Mears knows all about that.
"Being that young and moving away — it was big for me and maturing," Mears said. "Now, it was worth it, but then I felt like it was a nightmare."
Mears was the only '07 on a team of mainly '04s and '05s when he was a freshman in 2022-23. He's friends with many of those guys now, but that wasn't the case in the fall of 2022.
"I was just getting to orientation, I'm figuring out classes," Mears said. "I'm not going to go approach [the upperclassmen] for a ride."
Staying on campus more during fall weekends also offers players a chance to participate in social, non-hockey activities at their school.
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Mears, now a senior, is a prefect at Frederick Gunn, which is a big leadership role on campus. He is supposed to attend certain weekend events.
"You want to play split [season], but sometimes you have certain commitments [at school], so it just gets very tricky," Mears said. "It just burns you out with the travel and just getting back so late sometimes."
Prep teams playing together in the fall is nothing new. Cushing mostly plays as the Central Mass. Penguins. Kimball Union is the Fall Prep Wildcats. Dexter Southfield just began as the Brookline Whalers. Berkshire plays as Holy Name, while Winchendon plays as the Islanders Hockey Club East and Holderness is Islanders Hockey Club West. Phillips Exeter now plays as the Neponset Valley River Rats North 19U team. There's Peak Performance Prep Hockey, which is a New England fall prep league, too. These are just some examples.
Those teams can offer their players a one-stop shop for playing hockey in the fall and the winter. It also gives them an advantage entering the regular prep slate come late November and early December.
Cushing won the Elite 8 last season. The year before that, it was Kimball Union. Both played together in the fall.
"I think this could change an entire season for a team," Mears said.
This also gives younger players a chance to acclimate to facing older, stronger talent. Rather than having the first 10 games of the prep season to adjust, that can come in the fall.
"If we're playing Deerfield and Salisbury a couple of times in the fall, those new guys are going to have such a different adjustment period than they normally do," Mears said.
Leavitt mentioned wanting this to become the "preseason" for prep and, once they wring out the kinks of the first year, more schools to join.
"I definitely think we're going to have more schools. Forget about just this league in particular," Badger said. "I've been the president of the coaches' association, and I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of coaches would love to move in this type of direction."
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There's also a perception — right or wrong — that prep schools don't play enough games together as a team.
"This really counteracts that completely at that point, right?" Badger said. "If you're getting another 18 games in the fall as a group against other prep competition, it keeps the team together.
"It creates a better day-to-day, weekend-to-weekend experience for the kids and allows them to continue to enjoy all the non-hockey benefits of a boarding school experience, while giving them a little bit more hockey and while still complying with NESPAC rules."
