When Mike Anderson and Peter Masters came calling, Ben McManama was, at first, dismissive. He was already in charge of Bishop Kearney Selects, a highly successful hockey academy in Rochester, N.Y.
Anderson and Masters were pitching McManama on a new job: general manager of boys hockey for the new Masters Academy International.
The catch: Masters Academy didn’t really exist yet. There was funding (lots of it), but construction on the campus had just begun. There were no students.
And then, of course, there was McManama’s biggest fear.
“That this was just going to be another hockey academy,” McManama said. “They pop up left and right.”
But Masters, one of the co-founders of MAI with his brother Chris, and Anderson, the director of boys hockey, were persistent. Masters explained the financial backing the hockey program — and the school — would have.
McManama was intrigued. Enough to make the trip from Rochester down to Stow, Mass., where the school was slated to be.
“You couldn’t really see what the school was going to look like,” McManama said. “But you looked at the campus, and you knew what this could become.”
McManama was in. And he quickly switched roles, becoming the one pitching what was still sort of an idea to prospective families. Anderson had to do the same.
“Before we made a single recruiting call, what was a non-negotiable for me was that we had people in place who had the relationships necessary to make those calls,” Anderson said. “Because what we were selling wasn’t even built yet.”
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More staff were hired along with McManama. Many of them came from a New England prep school background.
“I worked in both prep and hockey academies,” McManama said. “The biggest thing that came full circle for me was that Masters Academy was a hybrid between a hockey academy and a New England prep school.”
That became the basis of their recruiting pitch. It also guided them in creating a program for Year 1. A year when the most eyes will be on them — for good and bad.
No more 16U hockey
As Anderson put together a plan for how it wanted to structure its boys hockey program, there were a few definite ideas.
Having a 14U hockey team made a lot of sense. Throughout the country, 14U hockey is extremely strong. The same was true for having a 15-only team. Anderson had just gone through it with his son Brodie’s Minuteman Flames team. The Flames were one of the top 15O teams in the United States, which is a legitimate accomplishment given how deep the field consistently is at that age.
Past the 15O level, though?
“There seems to be a split in where kids go,” Anderson said. “Kids are going in 1,000 different directions nowadays.”
This is true. Look at a fall team’s 15O roster and then that birth year’s 16U roster a year later, and they will often look totally different. The best of the best have always skipped town for the U.S. National Team Development Program. Once a player hits their 16U year, they can opt for junior hockey, which an increasing number of players are doing. Many prep school teams now have their own fall teams. So when a player turns 16, they often play with their prep team in the fall.
Anderson and McManama wanted Masters to play the best teams in the United States at every birth year.
“You have to give your kids that environment to push them developmentally,” Anderson said. “It keeps them on track with whatever the top players are doing.”
They felt they couldn’t deliver that at the 16U level because of how thin those teams can be across the United States, and especially in New England, which led to their real breakthrough.
Incoming Masters Academy players such as Will Torres (Framingham, Mass.), Ethan Machado (Wayland, Mass.), Owen Frick (Holden, Mass.), Owen Lundin (Bolton, Mass.) and Brodie Anderson, played for prep schools last winter, regularly competing with and against 18-year-olds.
“Why are we entertaining birth year hockey for a full season if they’ve already played up?” Anderson asked himself.
That led Masters Academy to opt for its top squad to be dubbed the “prep team.” They play 18U teams, but their roster is mostly ‘10s, with a few ‘09s sprinkled throughout.
“We can take kind of a combined birth year model and extend it out over a full season,” Anderson said. “That opens up the opportunity for us to compete against a lot of different teams that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to go see.”
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The prep team’s schedule features matchups with fall club teams like the Brookline Whalers, the Northern Conn. Nor’Easter and the Yale Junior Bulldogs. The team opened its season at the Eastern Alliance Kickoff over Labor Day weekend. On Oct. 16 and 17, Masters Academy will be up in Canada playing St. Andrew’s College.
From December through February, the schedule is populated with teams like Mount St. Charles, Shattuck-St. Mary’s, South Kent and the New Jersey Rockets — full-season teams and academies.
Teams were sometimes hesitant at first to put Masters Academy on the schedule. But as hype grew and Anderson and McManama told these teams who they had recruited up to that point, those teams became more open.
“It was like when Masters called me to take the job,” McManama said.
As for playing New England prep schools, Anderson assumed there wouldn’t be any NEPSAC games on the schedule when he was first tasked with creating the schedule. Still, he reached out to a handful of prep coaches he had good relationships with to gauge interest.
“There was no animosity from them,” Anderson said. “It just wasn’t something that made a lot of sense to pursue in Year 1.
“We might not be playing prep teams in, say, the Lawrence/Groton tournament, but that’s OK because we’re getting a pretty accurate representation of them in the fall.”
A junior-friendly daily schedule
One of the things that attracted McManama to Masters Academy was that it was starting from scratch.
Typically, hockey academies are born in two ways: they sprout up in existing schools, or they operate on their own and mostly do school online.
“When you bring a hockey program into an existing school, you have to try to fit the hockey into the school,” McManama said. “Whereas when you start from scratch and you sit and you dedicate times, it makes it a lot easier for everything to function because it’s designed with sports and academics in mind.”
Every sport at Masters Academy will do different things in the morning and in the afternoon. Boys hockey will have classes from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Then comes lunch, and then an afternoon focused on hockey.
Some days, players will go straight to New England Sports Center, which is where Masters Academy will play until they build a rink on campus. Other days, they’ll work out at school before heading to the rink. During that time, coaches will lead film sessions, too.
“By doing it that way, it really helps kids separate their academic life from their athletic life,” McManama said. “They can succeed in both but not have to jump back and forth.”
Many players on the Masters Academy prep team were drafted earlier this year by junior hockey teams. Anderson and the staff very much hope players on the 15O team are picked next spring.
The pulls from those junior teams are real. Some players will often go out to a USHL or QMJHL destination for a weekend in the fall.
Masters Academy wants to make that easier, making Fridays a half-day for academics. There will be classroom time and academic support time, but no new material will be taught on Fridays.
That was also put in place to help when the team has to leave on a Thursday to play in a weekend showcase.
“We’re not disrupting your academic life because you have to travel somewhere,” Anderson said.
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Anderson went through this last season. It was difficult pulling players out of prep schools before the end of the academic week for events the Minuteman Flames had to travel to.
“We have a model in place where if kids need to leave or decide to leave for any period of time,” Anderson said. “Whether it be a few days or a few months, to go pursue an opportunity at the junior hockey level, we can support that.”
The ultimate goal
A little over a year ago, when Masters Academy announced its launch plans, I wrote: “The boys hockey scene already has similar kinds of places.” After naming those similar kinds of places, I continued: “How do their facilities stack up against other academies? Where will they play their games? Who are they playing?”
I wrote about the challenges Masters Academy would face at the 16U and 18U levels. Drawing players from prep school would be a challenge, too, I wrote, due to the pull of junior hockey and families wanting high-level academics.
Providing answers to those questions that I and many others have is a priority.
“I want an outsider to look at Masters after a year and have all those questions go away,” McManama said. “I feel extremely confident that the teams we’re rolling out the first year are going to be very good, but until we start playing games, people aren’t going to really know what we are.
“It’s about silencing the doubters for that first year because I can talk to anyone who’s anyone about how great this is going to be, but until they actually see it, they’re not going to know.”
That starts with player advancement, which, judging by the structure of their schedule, is something Masters Academy wants to lean into.
“I want to see some of our kids matriculate off to junior hockey,” Anderson said. “I want them to start their junior hockey careers and be successful.”
Along with the prep team, Masters also has an 18U AAA team. Anderson’s goal with that squad is for some of those players to eventually be drafted in junior hockey and play on the prep team the following year.
With the 15O team, the goal is the roadmap that many of Masters Academy’s ‘10s underwent last season with the Minuteman Flames.
“I’d love some high QMJHL and USHL picks,” Anderson said of the 15O team. “Hopefully have opportunities to be evaluated by the NTDP. That should be a great ladder of development for our 14s, too.”
There is also internal pride at Masters Academy that they competed with other high-end academies and prep school for talent across their 14U, 15O and prep team.
“The fact we were able to land enough of those players to populate our rosters before the governor even cut the ribbon is really cool,” Anderson said.
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But what must come before player advancement is player development.
“I hope that each kid individually develops at a very fast rate,” McManama said. “That’s the ultimate goal, right?”
And what about winning?
“Well, when you focus on each kid,” McManama started, “what ends up happening is you win national championships.”
