Elimination of Delayed Enrollment Rules Will Alter Landscape Once Again; Full Ramifications Still Unclear
by Adam Wodon/Managing Editor (@chn-adam-wodon)
As if the landscape of college sports hasn’t changed enough in recent years, college hockey is bracing for another large shift in the coming weeks.
NCAA president Charlie Baker recently said that he will try to get new age/eligibility rules pushed through the Division I Management Council at its May meeting.
The rule, intended to be for all sports, would allow five full years of college eligibility, but it must be fulfilled over a five-year period, beginning with the year you graduate high school, and no later than 19 years old.
The rule is intended to curb college football excesses, where players with multiple redshirts are sometimes competing at 25 or 26 years old, eight years after initial enrollment.
But the ramifications for hockey are large.
Until now, hockey has been allowed to use “delayed enrollment,” which means a player’s four-year clock doesn’t start ticking until they get to college, up to 21 years old. That allows players to play one, two or even three years of junior hockey before getting to the NCAA and still have five years to play four.
The new rules would alter the relationship between NCAA and junior hockey. In a likely scenario, players will delay graduating high school one year, turn 19 years old before officially graduating, so they can play junior hockey up until 19 and still get five years of eligibility. Or, they could stay in juniors until 20 or 21, but just get four or three years of eligibility remaining. No longer would a 21-year old entering college hockey still have four years on the clock.
Some believe this may help prep schools, whose influence has been waning, by kids going there to repeat a high school year so they don’t graduate until 19. Though no one knows the full ramifications at this point.
This means that the oldest a player could be in college hockey will be 24. Last season in D-I men’s college hockey, there were 16 players who were 25 years old as of Jan. 1, 2026. If you extend that to March 31, it was 65 players. Some portion of those, or all, would not be eligible.
On the flip side, the rule would allow that fifth year of eligibility, which could take away opportunities for new players, depending on how many players decide to take advantage of the extra year. There’s no way to foresee that at this point. Ivy League teams, however, won’t have that luxury, as it were, because league rules don’t allow grad students to play. Other schools, like Lake Superior State and Union, don’t offer grad programs. Can a player just slow roll his college graduation over five years, or will the fifth year have to be done as a grad student? That part is currently unclear.
“Am I concerned about this? A hundred percent,” Princeton coach Ben Syer said. “It doesn’t help us. You’re constantly tweaking and changing stuff here to make things work, and so it’s not making things easier, But it also is what it is.”
Perhaps most importantly, no one knows how this rule will be phased in, if at all. There are players right now in juniors assuming they will have four years of eligibility remaining. There are also current seniors who could theoretically play a fifth season if the rule changes right away. Some are entering the transfer portal now under the possibility that they will be allowed to play a fifth year, if the NCAA legislation takes effect immediately. That is where the chaos is at the moment.
“You wish you had more input. We thought we did,” CCHA commissioner Don Lucia said. “We were worried about delayed enrollment a year ago when they started talking about changing rules. But I think we were caught off guard when they moved the one-year delayed enrollment to no delayed enrollment, and then the five years of eligibility. It would’ve been more palatable if they moved to one-year delayed enrollment, then said you had five to play five. That would’ve been a lot easier to stomach. We’re one of the only sports that has to deal with delayed enrollment.”
The six conference commissioners met during the Frozen Four with Baker and his chief of staff Tim Buckley. They were told to reach out to people at the NCAA office with their concerns, and how to go about getting heard. That was done last week.
“All three people we spoke to understood that college hockey is one of the sports that’s directly impacted by this proposed legislation,” ECAC commissioner Doug Christiansen said. “They understood there needs to be a plan for hockey. They asked us to put together a position paper and have it to them by middle of May.”
The commissioners will be at the upcoming annual coaches convention in Florida, and formulating a final proposal.
The focus seems to be not necessarily trying to lobby to permanently keep existing rules, but rather the best way to handle a transition to the new rules. Most people in college hockey would prefer if the same “delayed enrollment” rules continue, but that doesn’t seem likely at the moment.
“The best possibility for us is to focus on what any transition will look like to protect opportunities for athletes,” Christiansen said. “Hockey is very clearly an outlier. The majority of high schools don’t offer hockey, so it has to have a junior hockey system.”
The Division I Management Council will ultimately be making the decision. Of its members, three have some relationship to college hockey — New Hampshire athletic director Allison Rich, Michigan State deputy athletic director Jennifer Smith, and Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher.
The college hockey world has been hoping for some autonomy in these decisions. In the past, hockey leaders have always been pretty successful at lobbying and explaining to the NCAA decision-makers how hockey has differences, and exceptions need to be carved out into the rules.
But the NCAA seems extremely concerned right now with standardizing its rules. And when doing so, it’s going to make rules that cater to what’s best for college football.
“This is coming to take care of Alabama football and basketball so the point guard isn’t 26 years old making 10 million a year with a family of four,” Syer said. “That’s tongue in cheek but that’s the reality.”
Once again, coaches will have to alter their recruiting strategies to handle another seismic shift. Smaller schools, already pushed to the brink, could, at least partially, lose the advantage of recruiting older players.
The net effect will be that college hockey would get younger, to some degree or another. There will be some mitigating of that by delaying high school graduation, however that seems like a negative unintended side effect of the legislation.
And on the other end, it remains to be seen how many players remain for a fifth year. College hockey did see, when players were granted a fifth year of eligibility due to losing the COVID year, that many took advantage of it.
“Fewer kids can come in per year, so that’s not good. And we all know most kids in hockey are graduating in four years anyway,” Lucia said. “So you’re going to go to grad school? You have to do that, you have to be a in grad school program.
“Some may say they’re done in four years, but others could say, ‘Hey, I’ll have my masters paid for (by staying another year).'”
And don’t expect the Ivy League to change its rules on that.