You know, what's been going on with USA Hockey?

Yeah, wow.

I mean, the biggest news, of course, is the launch of the DL.

And, you know, we ended up, the committee ended up deciding 29 teams was the right number for now.

And, you know, we put out 29 invitations, 29 acceptances, which, you know, was, you know, it's funny.

You know, there was a narrative.

Oh, this team isn't going to accept and that team is like, oh, what's going to happen? And the fact is, we were never really concerned about that.

What are some of the... you know, the more challenging things that have come up on your end that, you know, that you're working through or perhaps that are, what are some of the, you know, the concerns, the major concerns that you're fielding and looking at, you know, as a priority?

It's just such an exciting time to be part of it.

Well, it was, right? It was an unbelievable accomplishment that we all share in.

And I think it's important when we talk about three gold medals that we talk about the fact that all of us as hockey people, as United States hockey people, in youth hockey, in junior hockey, all through the ranks of what we do in associations all over the United States, we shared in what happened.

And I think that's what made it so exciting.

The other thing, I guess, you know, our good friend Kenny Martell, who works with USA Hockey, he said something, and for me, it couldn't be more true.

1980 was a miracle.

2026 was intentional and you know what that really frames the whole thing right and we still talk about the miracle in 1980 and it was it was a miracle on ice we didn't have the development system behind our players at that time we were young not fledgling but a young young uh national governing body that you know uh Years before that, registration was still on index cards in a guy's basement in New York City.

And without kind of articulating that, I think a lot of parents would be like, well, that's not what I remember.

All right, so with the development re- league, and, and kind of what I just, to piggyback on what I just talked about with the American player now, you know, keeping, maintaining their college eligibility by playing in Canada and vice versa, whatever, what was the inspiration for the DL league? Is this to help protect the USHL? Is this to make sure that we're, we're keeping as many kids here in the USA who move on to play junior hockey as possible? I'm just curious the inspiration behind creating this league to begin with.

So I would say if, if I had to narrow it down to two or three major things, what you just said was absolutely one of the top three, right? We want to get...

We want to, first of all, redefine the pathway of high performance hockey, right? High performance hockey is not having over 200 tier one teams in the United States, right? That's not high performance.

That's way too many people, players at the top of the pyramid, okay? Is tier one continue to be important, or will it? Absolutely.

Do we need a strong number of strong tier one programs? Absolutely.

But the idea was for us to redefine the pathway so, um, players...

When you talk about player development, playing and practicing against players of likability is very important, right? So by creating the DL, we've created a natural pathway for the American player through youth hockey.

All right, so why have U15 and then U17? Like, was there, was there thought about having a U15, U16, and U17? Explain how you came to, to that decision.

Yes.

Right? Right from the beginning, you know, uh, the USA Hockey Congress, the volunteers, the board of directors, they had that expectation, and so did we on the ground at the NTDP.

So, um, we have that same expectation for the DL.

But to fully answer your question, we do have to go back a little bit.

Right? We have to go back to 1996 when USA Hockey decided that we, we had good players at the very top, right? But those players, we didn't have enough, and they didn't really have a training ground where they could excel at the very highest levels of the sport, the NHL and international hockey.

And that's really what was behind the NTDP is let's bring them together, let's train them in the right manner, let's put development first so we could raise the bar of all hockey in, in the United States.

And then once that was done, now you fast-forward to 2009, and now all of a sudden we're having a tremendous run at the NTDP in terms of number of players in the NHL, number of drafted players, success on the international stage.

That leads me down the path that there's gonna be a lot more programs that don't hear their name called today than do, and what would your message be to that group?

Yes.

Right? Right from the beginning, you know, uh, the USA Hockey Congress, the volunteers, the board of directors, they had that expectation, and so did we on the ground at the NTDP.

So, um, we have that same expectation for the DL.

But to fully answer your question, we do have to go back a little bit.

Right? We have to go back to 1996 when USA Hockey decided that we, we had good players at the very top, right? But those players, we didn't have enough, and they didn't really have a training ground where they could excel at the very highest levels of the sport, the NHL and international hockey.

And that's really what was behind the NTDP is let's bring them together, let's train them in the right manner, let's put development first so we could raise the bar of all hockey in, in the United States.

And then once that was done, now you fast-forward to 2009, and now all of a sudden we're having a tremendous run at the NTDP in terms of number of players in the NHL, number of drafted players, success on the international stage.

That leads me down the path that there's gonna be a lot more programs that don't hear their name called today than do, and what would your message be to that group?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which I don't follow.

So I don't know.

But think those of you are history majors.

Right.

What it is, is it's going to be up to 32 organizations when we first announced this.

Yeah.