Moral high ground? Let's get back from the forest to see the trees.
 
        On a statistical basis, it is a tremendous advantage to have two or three
extra years to add muscle mass before playing college hockey. To say
nothing of developing a much better and mature head for the game.
 
        There are not enough rides in hockey to redshirt all the freshmen like
football does, and besides college hockey doesn't draw well enough to
justify it financially if there were. So the system and the law of player
supply and demand work to make PG years and USHL experience a requirement.
  That doesn't happen in a lot of sports.   Hockey is pretty unique here.
 
        All of us can cite vignettes which are good counter-examples. In my mind,
 they just prove the rule. Dave Hendrickson's example of BC is a case in
point. The next year those kids he mentions were on the power play and
playing for the national championship. True. And they were joined on the
power play, if memory serves (and I am not going to bother to look it up),
by a twenty or twenty one year old freshman from Niskayuna who had done
BOTH the prep school and the USHL thing.
 
        I think the point is that a large proportion of the kids who play at the
D-1 level have now been forced into extra years after high school before
they are big enough and good enough to play in college. From a hockey
perspective that is perhaps OK. But the vast majority are not going to make
careers in hockey. For them, is it OK? For the schools in question and the
effect that it has on campus culture is it OK? Those are the questions
which have to be asked.
 
        -- Dick Tuthill
 
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