Jared Erickson, Head Coach - Oklahoma State University

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And it sounds like, you know, because, you know, I bring up kind of the differences between ACHA and NCAA, you know, quite often.

And, you know, obviously NCAA Division I is the top of the top.

But after that, I feel like in the last, I would say, five to six years and it kind of gets better.

And you can probably speak better on this than I can, but it seems like the ACHA has just continued to get better and better and better and better and better.

And now it's to the point to where, you know, I would say some of these ACHA division one or division two schools, you could throw them against, you know, some of these NCAA division, you know, two or three schools, and you wouldn't know which one was an NCAA team and which one was the ACHA team.

And I do feel like a lot of that is because the ACE ACHA has, has spread so quickly.

And there's so many of these really, really, really good collegiate club teams.

I tell kids all the time, like I said, I'm 40, but I tell them all the time, you guys are so lucky.

You can continue to go play collegiate hockey at a high level, you know, and, and have the support.

And I know obviously there's some club teams that have more support than other club teams, but can you kind of speak on, you know, since you were playing an ACHA and now you're, coaching in it.

Just kind of how you've seen it progress and how the league has grown since you started playing in it, you know, till today.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

I think the ACHA has done a really good job of kind of spreading their wings and welcoming all programs.

That's what obviously there's, I want to say there's 210 ACHA D2 programs.

I want to say right around 80 ACHA D1, and I don't quite know what the ACHA D3 a huge number and there's so many universities out there that offer really unique college experiences, right? that all don't have NCAA programs.

And it's like, you can really get a really unique college experience at the same time, play some really competitive college hockey.

That's what I think if you told people about the ACHA 10 years ago, they'd say, Oh, it's just basically a glorified men's league that you show up.

You hopefully have matching socks and matching jerseys and you go play against some other basically men's league teams.

But that's what I mean.

It's grown so much.

I mean, obviously with, the different uh the chl rule change that pushes a lot of talent to a lot of programs and i think the acha has definitely benefited from that and um i mean our our university is one of them as well that's what there's a lot of kids that kind of get displaced and they're on that bubble of okay now division one isn't quite in the picture where am i going to go am i going to go to a d3 school which kind of looking at a lot of D3 programs.

They're smaller universities and you are typically paying a good chunk to go to them, or you can go to a bigger university.

Some are more expensive, some are not.