The NCAA rule change allowing CHL players to play Division One college hockey beginning in the 2025-2026 season is sparking a lot of other changes.
With multiple high profile young players leaving CHL clubs for NCAA programs, or not honoring their commitments to CHL clubs in order to pursue these new NCAA paths, the OHL is responding.
A change to overage player eligibility means teams can now register an overage player who spent the previous 19-year-old season in either the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) or British Columbia Hockey League (BCHL). Previously, OHL clubs could only sign and register an overage player if they had spent the previous season on a Hockey Canada or USA Hockey team.
Now this definitely heats up recruiting battles of younger players who were able to make the leap to NCAA hockey as an eighteen or nineteen year old. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out that the recruiting of younger NCAA players to the OHL is next up in the recruiting wars.
What the NCAA has created with its rule change to allow CHL players the ability to play Division One college hockey is simply a disaster. Not only did the rule change take away opportunities from players who were committed to the NCAA path for most of their lives, but now it has the potential to see some the NCAA’s best young recruits leave for the CHL.
NCAA leadership is exactly what hockey does not need. From allowing a fifth year of eligibility for all players due to COVID, to the transfer portal, to NIL money, and now the CHL players opportunity to play NCAA. Nothing but a string of abject failures in leadership.
While attempting to avoid a lawsuit by allowing CHL players eligibility, and giving NCAA coaches the ability to decommit players in order to sign CHL players, the NCAA has failed. And in the course of this failure the leadership may have also created another vacuum to allow young NCAA talent a way out of NCAA hockey.
If an eighteen year old or nineteen year old arrives at his NCAA program, but suddenly doesnt like his role, or disagrees with his playing time he can simply walk away to the OHL. Then what does the NCAA program do? Replacements mid season? Raid the roster of an OHL club?
Why is this a problem? Historically, NCAA Hockey has the highest graduation rates of all NCAA sports, and the highest average GPA of all college sports. That is about to change, and that kind of change is not good for Universities, players or for hockey.
Remembering that most hockey players from the CHL and NCAA never get a sniff of the NHL isn’t it more important to ensure they get an education? Not by todays standards and rule making. Lets be honest, the CHL and OHL do not give one damn about the NCAA, this is about business. The NCAA put the open for business sign up, and now there could be a line of once loyal customers looking at new options.
