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Scouting America
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"They've turned HNIB into a year-round business," Anderson said. "They publish their recruiting guides and information on the kids. Their newspaper publishes results of travel-hockey games and they have a full scouting service that provides personal information on the kids. They have the best players for a one-week tournament in March at the end of the high-school season. It pulls them all back together again but not as many as in the summer. It's an All-Star tournament, the best of the best." While scouts can watch a half-dozen or more prospects in a HNIB game, sometimes they have to drive hours through Minnesota snowstorms to see one player, only to realize that due to a lack of quality opposition it's hard to draw an accurate conclusion. "I saw Eric Rasmussen in high school and he was 6-foot-3, 190 pounds at 18, playing against 5-foot-7 sophomores," Barzee said. "The hockey was just brutal compared to the level we're looking at in the USHL and college. You see these kids dominate their shifts and you say, 'Wow, how good is this kid going to be in two or three years?' You have to be careful." The national team
Talk to Kevin McLaughlin, USA Hockey's Director of Youth Hockey, and you might wonder why the scouts log so many miles. He begins gathering America's top talent each summer with boys as young as 14. The entire USA Hockey organization helps to identify the best players. "Are there ways to make it easier for an NHL scout to do his job?" McLaughlin asked. "Sure, go to Ann Arbor any weekend. We have what we think are the best 44 players in the U.S. Some kids turn us down but it's rare. We get the majority of kids we invite. We do we make some mistakes, just like an NHL GM makes some mistakes. But our 16-year-old team is pretty scary. It might be the best group we've ever had. "In our summer national player development program for 14-to-17 year olds, we bring in the top 240 kids in each bracket for a week," McLaughlin said. "They try out in the 11 U.S. districts and advance to the national level. Any kid that has a desire to get exposure, if they go to those festivals and go through the tryout process, they will raise the attention of someone. While the Brian Boyles and Hugh Jessimans, etc., only play 25 games during their school seasons, they get exposure at our camps and every NHL team and NHL Central Scouting is there and the scouts are hard to miss." McLaughlin has studied the European and Russian hockey-development programs and believes a boy benefits from a well-rounded program of sports and studies, rather than a heavy concentration on hockey. "I can't condemn high school or prep school because I believe it's the best route for some kids," he said. "For instance, many people believe Boyle is capable of playing shortstop on a major-league level. I'm not sure playing other sports is a bad thing. He came to our festivals and went to our world junior camp. The University of Minnesota recruited a good player who was also an all-state quarterback. He left after a year to play in the USHL. Who's to condemn a kid for wanting to stay in his school, be a big man on campus and quarterback the football team? Where's the problem if you're continuing to develop as an athlete? "Another important issue is who knows which kids are ready to move away from home at 16 or 17? I guess my point is that there's no perfect system. All of them have been proven to work for some kids."
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