We’re halfway into the first college hockey season with Canadian Hockey League recruits playing for NCAA teams.
And, as it turns out, the sky has not fallen.
To be sure, CHL recruits have been impact players for many teams around the country. For example, the highest-profile prospect, Penn State’s Gavin McKenna–likely the No. 1 pick in the 2026 NHL draft–is tied for fifth among freshmen with 18 points. Maine’s Justin Poirier, a Carolina Hurricanes draftee who comes from Baie-Comeau of the QMJHL, leads all freshmen in scoring with 26 points (19 goals, also a freshman superlative).
But, for the most part, CHL recruits have not come in and totally changed the way college hockey is played. And especially in a league like the CCHA, the ability to recruit CHL players has largely not changed the model for how teams construct their rosters. It’s simply opened up the player pool.
CCHA commissioner Don Lucia–a longtime proponent of opening up the NCAA to the CHL–said that, by and large, CCHA teams are still relying on older recruits compared to the younger, blue chip prospects that leagues like the Big Ten and NCHC typically recruit.
“There are two different types of players that are coming into college hockey. And our teams rely more on older guys that are going to be aging out of junior hockey,” Lucia said. “Most of them, they’ve come in and done a nice job. I think it’s increased the skill level in our league, I think more goals are being scored. But it’s only a half-year in, there’s still an adjustment period for these kids, like any junior player. I mean, you’re going from junior where you’re playing against up to 20 year olds, to now you’re playing up to 24 year olds. And so there’s that adjustment to speed, an adjustment to school. But that’s not just a CHL player that goes through that, it’s a USHL player, a North American player, any player.”
Scoring is slightly up in the CCHA–a year ago conference teams scored 2.62 goals per game, and through the first half of this season they’re at 2.78.
And for Bowling Green head coach Dennis Williams, the more high-quality, high-skilled players that come into the CCHA the better.
“Looking around, not just us but the other teams in our league, they’ve done a really good job of bringing in some really good players that helps elevate not only their program, but the CCHA as well,” Williams said. “And what we want to be able to do as a conference, and this is just me speaking, I root for all our CCHA teams to go 8-0 in nonconference, because that brings us more validity, that helps me with my recruiting. So at the end of the day, if we lose a good player to another team in our league, whoever it is, from wherever, obviously, you’re always a little bit sour, because you’re in a battle, but if I lose them to another team in the league, I know now we’ve got a good player in our league.
“And that increases the competition level, which helps us market and sell our league. And at the end of the day, we live in a world of social media, of Instagram, X, whatever you want to look at, right? Impressions are everything out there now, right? So the more good news we can continue to build, and the better players we continue to bring into the CCHA, the better it is for all teams within the league.”
Some CHL’ers are making an immediate impact. Bemidji State’s Oliver Peer has been near the top of the league leaderboard in scoring all season (as of this writing he was tied for first with 12 goals and is fourth overall with 21 points). The Beavers, who brought in seven players with CHL experience, have also been rolling with a goaltender rotation that features Max Hildenbrand, who was the WHL’s goaltender of the year last season. Lake Superior State’s Calum Mangone leads his team in goalscoring and is second in points (8-7-15). Michigan Tech’s roster has 10 former CHL players, and were the only team in the CCHA team to have players with junior eligibility left. Freshmen Teydon Trembecky (second on the Huskies in scoring with 14 points), Reid Anderson, Carson Birnie and Rylan Gould all left the WHL early to play college hockey.
But Bowling Green had perhaps the most obvious pipeline to CHL players thanks in part to their coach’s CHL connections. Williams, who played for the Falcons in the 90s and was an assistant at BGSU in the 2000s, was the head coach of the Everett Silvertips of the WHL from 2017-2024. His intimate knowledge of that league–especially the WHL’s Western Conference–proved to be a boon in this years’ recruiting class. Of the 11 freshmen on the Falcons this season, six came directly from the WHL and five of them (Connor Levis, Brayden Crampton, Brandon Whynott, Dominik Rymon and Jake Sloan) played for or against Williams’s Silvertips teams in the WHL’s Western Conference. A sixth newcomer–sophomore goaltender Tyler Palmer–transferred in from the University of Alberta in U Sports and played for Williams in Everett before college.
“Obviously, last year we took a lot of guys from the Western League, based on my familiarity with all those players. The guys that we committed to quickly were guys that I would have coached against for four years and played them probably 50 times, 12 times a year, roughly. And so the familiarity was there and it’s still there,” Williams said, noting that they were able to get a bunch of early commits because of those connections. “But what I’m finding more this year, as you could imagine, is more teams are out there. I was on the road all last week, and you’re rolling into a town on a Wednesday or Thursday, and there’s six other colleges where last year it was probably just us. So it makes the competition greater now, often everyone’s kind of combing through all leagues, just like us. Because more and more players now have more options, because I’m seeing more and more teams out there.”
‘Everybody has a different path’
Williams–who also was a coach for team Canada at the World Juniors in 2022 and 2023–clearly know the landscape of Canadian junior hockey well. But he also has experience coaching in both the NAHL and the USHL. He’s been everywhere, and knows better than most what opening up the college hockey player pool is doing for college hockey as a whole–it gives more players more options.
“You know, it’s a tough decision to put a kid in, a player at that time to make a decision whether you’re going CHL or NCAA. So I think now, with the move, it’s obviously opened up the prospects of student athletes. Everybody has a different path,” Williams said. “We were able at Bowling Green here to get a number of players from the CHL that have done really well for us. We got a lot of freshmen on our team right now, and we’ve taken a few early season kind of lumps, which we hope pays dividends as we move on, but it’s definitely a student athlete that is new to college hockey. So it’s a tough transition.”
Williams relayed a conversation he had with a few of his freshmen before they left for the holiday break. He said they were reflecting on the progress they’ve made this season, and he was asking them how many even thought about playing college hockey before the NCAA opened up its doors a year ago.
“Those players didn’t even think of college hockey. They’re all trying to be pros. But now that they’re here, they’re taking classes, they’re doing workouts, and they’re battling every day in practice. Compared to the CHL, they’re different grinds,” he said. “You know, CHL has got travel, and obviously one of their strengths is the number of games they play. But one of the strengths we have down here is making these players more accustomed to the weight room, getting bigger, stronger and faster throughout the season, and having to practice every day against grown men, and having a battle each weekend. So I think it’s been a big transition for a lot of guys, just like it would be for any player, be it the USHL or North American League or Europe or whatever. So I don’t want to just pigeonhole and say it’s the CHL, it’s every freshman.”
‘If you want to go to college and get a college education, we should be embracing that’
Another new frontier for college recruiting is related to the CHL: Canadian college hockey teams, a.k.a. U Sports. Seven players transferred to CCHA teams from U Sports programs. Bemidji State led the way with three. Williams said U Sports is full of great players who either didn’t get a chance to go pro or players who played a season or two of pro hockey and decided it wasn’t for them yet. Being in a unique position–a CHL coach with an NCAA background–Williams always made sure to tell players who weren’t ready for pros to try U Sports as a viable option.
“When I was in Everett, I would always have those talks with our guys early and often, not every 20 year old on our team was going to sign pro. So I want to make sure they had a good school back in Canada,” he said. “For the majority of these guys, they’ve been destined, kind of like a racehorse with the blinders on, playing in the CHL for the last four or five years, and all they think about it, I’m going pro, I’m going pro. So U Sports gives them a viable option.”
It also used to be the place where players who had played a season or two of minor pro hockey would end up if they wanted to get a college degree and still play hockey–something they couldn’t previously do in the NCAA. But as we’ve seen this season, with the most notable example of Bemidji State’s Hudson Thornoton, among others, the NCAA increasingly cares less about players who make five figures playing in the ECHL considering some players are making millions on NIL deals.
Lucia put it best, saying “there’s no reason to fear the Boogeyman.”
“I completely changed my mind when we started paying the players in college. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, and just somebody needs to justify to me that you can’t make 500 bucks a month before you get to college, but you can make $500,000 or much more while you’re in college. It just didn’t seem right,” he said. “I’m not too concerned about somebody that might have made 50 grand playing some minor pro when you’ve got college athletes making $2 million. It’s new, it’s different, but in the scheme of things, it’s not a big deal. In many ways, it’s like, who cares where a kid plays before they get to college? If you want to go to college and get a college education, we should be embracing that.”