New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

[giwan]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

If a player has the chance for a free ride (may or may not be the case, irrelevant though) to play hockey in Boston or the same deal to play hockey in the middle of Nowheresville, UP, where do you think he's going to play?

Yeah who would want to live in a smoggy, sooty and congested city. Except for people with delusions of grandeur. Obviously the smarter choice would be Houghton.

[St. Clown]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

Yeah who would want to live in a smoggy, sooty and congested city. Except for people with delusions of grandeur. Obviously the smarter choice would be Houghton.

A Houghton 9 is a 4 outside the UP. Just sayin'. The rest of the world has attractive things to offer. It doesn't have to be Boston (a city where the lady undergrads outnumber the guys) or any of the other big city schools, just a school that's not locked away from civilization and buried under 15ft of snow every year.

From a recruiting standpoint, the average guy isn't going to choose MTU over a school of identical stature in a more accessible part of the country, let alone a step up in school recognition such as Harvard.

[XCTiger]

Both of these pieces just reinforce to me that that the objective is to make college hockey more like football and basketball - A feeder system for the NHL, NFL, and NBA. The argument to make hockey fit closer to the "traditional college model" is BS. At the big time college level those players are far from students.

The impetus behind all of this is summed perfectly up by Jeff Jackson wondering why ND lost to Alaska-Fairbanks his first year. The best excuse he could come you with was that they were older? But this isn't about tipping the advantage toward the "real DI" programs. :-{

[unofan]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

I'm saying he verbally committed to Michigan Tech in May 2014 and in November 2014, he flipped to Harvard. Who instigated the switch is anyone's guess but Mel Pearson did not have very nice comments about Harvard and what happen in this situation on one of his radio shows.

If this were anything other than sports related, it'd be obvious what happened. He found out he got in to Harvard.

[Slap Shot]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

Roughly 40% of college students are 25 and older - source.

How many of them are athletes?

[St. Clown]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

How many of them are athletes?

For a hockey team, 8 of the players dressed would have to be 25 or older to represent the student population as a whole. So saying that all freshmen should be 18, 19 or 20 "because it's college hockey" is a canard from the start.

[Wisko McBadgerton]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

For a hockey team, 8 of the players dressed would have to be 25 or older to represent the student population as a whole. So saying that all freshmen should be 18, 19 or 20 "because it's college hockey" is a canard from the start.

100% of all D-1 freshman college athletes are 18 or 19, or very occasionally 20 outside of hockey and skiing. It's not a canard, college hockey is an anomaly.

[St. Clown]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

100% of all D-1 freshman college athletes are 18 or 19, or very occasionally 20 outside of hockey and skiing. It's not a canard, college hockey is an anomaly.

Yet the age of college hockey players more closely resembles the student population as a whole. Ironic, isn't it, that the abnormal sport has the more normal students?

ETA: And now that the Ugly Helmets so severely ***** slapped the Gophers tonight, what new rules with tDon put through to help his team win in the future against teams in his own league?

[Middle Street]

NOTRE DAME COACH JEFF JACKSON EXPLAINS WHY HE SUPPORTS BIG TEN’S FRESHMAN AGE LIMIT PROPOSAL

That's interesting. Now that Jeff Jackson and Mike Cavanaugh have both publicly said they are in favor we now know two of the three HE schools that voted in favor. I had assumed both BC and BU approved. Maybe one of them was the school that abstained from voting?

[LynahFan]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

Yet the age of college hockey players more closely resembles the student population as a whole. Ironic, isn't it, that the abnormal sport has the more normal students?

To be fair, it's probably not right to compare hockey player average ages to the nationwide average. I suspect that the nationwide average age is dragged upwards by a lot of the "Central Western Valley State University at Podunk" type schools whose missions are entirely different (still valuable, mind you) from Cornell, for example. The average age of freshmen entering Cornell this year is 18, so a 21-year-old freshman is definitely not the norm. I'm sure that's true at most schools playing D-1 hockey, which tend to be toward the higher end of the academic range.

[UMICH]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

Roughly 40% of college students are 25 and older - source.

What percent of that 40% are Freshmen? Make a relevant point please....

I'm also assuming that those statistics are including Community Colleges WITHOUT sports teams.

[Dutchman]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

Yet the age of college hockey players more closely resembles the student population as a whole

Good point !!! and the actual data from none other than the University of Minnesota, for 2015, bears this out.
Campus and Unit Enrollment by Age for Fall 2015
http://www.oir.umn.edu/student/enrol.../current/13267
(Data on this report is an age range which the student falls into at the start of the term.)

The data is broken out for each of the University of Minnesota campuses and system wide as well. For the Twin Cities campus, 15,944 are at or OVER 25 (31%) and 31,373 are at or OVER 21 (62%). After looking over these figures you really get the sense of the enormous hypocrisy on the part of the University on Minnesota in generating this proposal. If we are thinking student athletes and what gives them the most choice and positions them for the rigors of competitive academics, older is better. Look at how many college D1 football and basketball players never graduate. These teams are nothing more than farm teams for the pro's. College hockey is doing an outstanding job around academics and college graduation rates because the players are older than in most other sports. Why don't we leave it up to the families and players to decide what is in their best interests and what is best for them?

[St. Clown]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

What percent of that 40% are Freshmen? Make a relevant point please....

I'm also assuming that those statistics are including Community Colleges WITHOUT sports teams.

What percentage of the general student population are freshmen at 25yo or older? I don't know, the government didn't give us that figure. What's your point? How many college hockey players are 25yo or older as freshmen? (Zero.)

[St. Clown]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

To be fair, it's probably not right to compare hockey player average ages to the nationwide average. I suspect that the nationwide average age is dragged upwards by a lot of the "Central Western Valley State University at Podunk" type schools whose missions are entirely different (still valuable, mind you) from Cornell, for example. The average age of freshmen entering Cornell this year is 18, so a 21-year-old freshman is definitely not the norm. I'm sure that's true at most schools playing D-1 hockey, which tend to be toward the higher end of the academic range.

To be fair, your experience is with the Ivies. My experience at SCSU is that during my freshman year I lived in the dorm popular with the Army ROTC students and athletes as it was closest to the Halenbeck Hall and the NHC, so I saw a lot of non-18 year old freshmen. State schools have a higher average student population age than the standard Ivy League school, I'd wager.

As an example, my nephew attends Mankato State currently. He joined the Army Reserves, not as a ROTC, just enlisted. He graduated high school at 18.5 years old, went to basic in July that year, then had his specialized training (forget the official name it has) and then was immediately deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was 20.75 years old when he was able to finally begin taking classes at Mankato.

My niece just graduated from high school this past June, and she has a November birthday. She's taking the year off to work in order to then pay for college classes. She will be three months shy of her 20th birthday when she enters her first college classroom next fall. Her situation is becoming more and more common for students (more likely their parents) wary of those huge student loan figures we're seeing.

The student population is on an upward trend in age, and these B1G Mistake coaches are trying to buck that trend because it serves their personal purpose of trying to win more games. Why else would they push this agenda? They don't care about their own students athletes until they're actually of service to their program. They certainly don't care about what's best for their opponents' players.

[LynahFan]

Re: New age restrictions for NCAA hockey

To be fair, your experience is with the Ivies. My experience at SCSU is that during my freshman year I lived in the dorm popular with the Army ROTC students and athletes as it was closest to the Halenbeck Hall and the NHC, so I saw a lot of non-18 year old freshmen. State schools have a higher average student population age than the standard Ivy League school, I'd wager.

To be even more fair, it has nothing to do with experience or anecdotes, but the hard statistics. I was really surprised to see the numbers that Dutchman dug up for UMTC - I didn't think the #s at a top-tier public school would be all that different from an Ivy.

And it turns out....they're not. I couldn't find official statistics published by Cornell, but according to this site, 24% of Cornell undergrads are over age 25 (compared with 31% at UMTC). I believe that the key factor which I forgot before is that the freshman statistics don't include transfers and non-traditional students (which Cornell refers to as "mature" students). So it's rather tautological that the average age of students who enter at age 18 would have an average age of....18, but the general student body is a good bit older than that on average.