Does a great job laying out the landscape of High School and Prep school hockey, with classes of schools using the Minnesota system as a standard. My summary with a bit of editorializing thrown in:
Essentially it's Minnesota D1 (the elite), D2 (solid AAA/AA range and depth) not elite, but can flex up into into D1, or down to just above D3), D3 (Mediocre level of play, often with wide variance of the overall skill level of the participants from some AAA/AA to players at JV/In house level spread across the team), and Minnesota Gold-B (Whatever teams that are left that are below Tier 3 level)
As a lot of players who advance to US Div 1 college programs come from Tier 1, this is a small collection, primarily according to the paper of about 40 Minnesota teams, and another 17 teams (a few from a handful of states, and the rest from Prep schools, including 2 in Minnesota).
In games between teams at each Division you would be expected to beat a lower division team by from 3-7 goals, depending on the range of their respective rating from high to low in the Division.
At least in minnesota from Div1 to Div3, its 26% Div1 (about 40 teams), 46% Div2, and 26% Div3.
As this should come as no surprise to most, the percentage of california high school teams per 100k population is .1 This is close to nascent in comparison to other traditional hockey states, and many non-traditional states for that matter. There's only 50+ teams in the state year to year. A handful of teams in the Ducks league qualify as Div 2 level (about 6 including teams from Nevada), with the rest of the Ducks/Kings league teams either at D3 or D4 level (roughly 50/50).
One could argue that the few california/nevada D2 teams are fairly equivalent to Prep school or Hockey Academy teams. Conversely it's hard to even qualify teams in the Kings league as High School teams, since they really are just another type of hockey, with an amalgam of hockey playing kids of jr high and high school age, who live in arbitrarily drawn geographic areas. The Kings don't even bother to really verify or check roster qualification from what I've seen. With no disrespect intended to the participants, the Kings league to me, given its relatively high cost relative to value, and disconnection from actual High schools in all but a couple of cases, is basically a failure at this juncture. It hasn't grown much from its inception, and the Kings organization seems to have little interest in growing it, discontinuing the original subsidies and moving the playoffs from Staples to the Toyota sports center
Just look at the line of Commissioners in its short history.
Not unlike the rest of california hockey, high school hockey in the state has a long way to go, and it seems unlikely to me that things will change much in the near future. You will still see a lot of kids grow up with the sport into the U14 age group, with a significant percentage looking elsewhere for higher levels of competition and development. Perhaps if clubs emerge to bridge the gap to actual schools, the Kings league might be able to grow, but eventually the leagues need to merge. I left out Norcal, because I know very little about High school options in that region.
Topic: A pre-Covid-19 survey of boys’ interscholastic HS hockey in North America (Read 11768 times)