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To the uneducated parent, please disregard statements such as ‘if you’re looking for an advisor your player is a lower NAHL player’. There are no absolutes that your player must be represented by an agent at 14 or even 16 and moving on to play junior hockey at 16 1/2. Kids blossom at different times. Kids get noticed at different times. Kids get noticed by agents or advisors at different times. Your 15 year old not having an agent doesn’t mean he’s a lower NAHL player. As if there’s anything wrong with that anyway. There are a number of advisors out there who will happily take your money. Just like there are a number of paid subscription websites out there who will drool over your kid if you subscribe. The problem is not the advisors or the faux scouting sites, it’s the elephant in the room that hockey is a rich kids sport. There’s a lot of obnoxious parents out there who view their child’s come up like they view everything else in life, as in they can purchase it. So they hire an advisor for 5k to ‘promote their kid’ or sign up for X site and all of the sudden their kid is ‘top 10 left winger in the country at the 08 by’ (According to the site they just signed up for @ $90 a month). There’s so many shithead parents in this sport driving this kind of thing that people would be stupid not to take advantage of it. Right now, more parents are reading what I just said and going to sign up on one of these sites (that no scouts pay attention to) rather than encouraging their kid to make sacrifices and become a player who, advisor or not, is going to play this sport long term. With that said, it’s good to ‘eventually’ find someone who’s reputable, that will help you navigate the landscape, especially when getting into the junior hockey world. Whether you pay that person, or they are free.

All sound advice Something no one else mentioned is....how interested is your kid in improving his stride? If you are forcing him to do off ice and go to lessons, you might as well give me that money, for as much good as it will do.

How big is he ? Does he have long legs ? Sometimes there is nothing you can do, the kid has to grow into his body. He’s 14, he will be hitting another growth spurt this spring - summer. There are many factors that have to do with skating strides. Not all of the are training. A lot of it is natural athletic ability, family genes etc. there is some guys in the nhl that have terrible strides for that level of play. For whatever scentific reason the smaller kids develop a good stride much earlier than the bigger kids. There is certain local kid in the ushl right now. Scouts knocked him and dismissed him until he was 17 because he didn’t have a “perfect stride”. Now at 19 he’s really smooth.growing into his body was his biggest problem. At 14 he was 6’ he grew pretty fast at a young age. he’s 6’4 now.