The D1 Dream: Can It Become a Reality?

Getting a child into a Division 1 school is the dream of many hockey parents. But can they make that dream come true?

By Dan Bauer

The D1 dream

In the classic sports movie “Hoosiers,” with his Hickory Huskers team one win from the state finals, Coach Dale tells his team, “I’m sure going to the State finals is beyond your wildest dreams. So let’s just keep it right there.”

The real 1954 Milan High School Indians (enrollment: 161) made that wildest dream come true. They defeated the mighty Muncie Central Bearcats (enrollment: 1,662), to become the smallest school to win the single-class Indiana state basketball championship. 

Fantastic movie, real life story, and sage advice.

Dreams Can Take Many Forms

Youth athletes have been dreaming about winning championships in dramatic fashion, and becoming professional athletes for roughly the last hundred years. From sandlots to frozen ponds to backyard football games, they have been playing out that dream of scoring the overtime game winner, hitting the walk-off homerun, or tossing that Super Bowl-clinching touchdown pass. It’s one of childhood’s liberties that lives on as a cherished memory.

The athletic fantasies of my childhood were my dreams, and my parents seemed to have enough common sense to realize the unlikely odds that professional sports were in my future. My passion for sports was developed in my neighborhood and guided mostly by me. I learned to love the game itself and played many sports throughout my life, eventually turning that passion into coaching and writing about it.

We live in a very different dream world today. 

The Parent Trap

Today, this dream is routinely hijacked by parents and redirected into a race toward a Division 1 college scholarship. What was once considered a rare privilege is now too often treated as an expectation. Anything short of D1 can feel like failure. A priceless journey once built on love for the game and hard-earned life lessons, has become a checkbook competition. Families are spending heavily in pursuit of that winning lottery ticket and and the hopes of realizing the D1 dream.

Kids today are often mere pawns in this extreme chess game of chance, with parents making all the moves.

The D1 dream starts early and is often driven by parents who project their aspirations onto their children. Allowing the game to be fun and nurturing a true passion for it is quickly replaced by a conveyor belt of skating clinics, specialized skill development, and a smorgasbord of “elite” teams. 

When everything is elite, nothing is truly elite.

Wizards of the Hockey Universe

Parents move from caretakers to wizards of the hockey universe, focused less on whether their kids are enjoying the game and more on positioning them for that D1 dream and then ultimately going pro. They mistakenly believe they are the straw that stirs everything and the catalyst to make this dream come true. Unfortunately, they too often become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. 

The emotional stress and burnout are real consequences of this modern-day obsession to seek the grail of a D1 scholarship. Mid-June used to represent the first phase of summer vacation; now it is D-Day for D1 dreamers. For every player who conquers this feat, there are hundreds who bitterly pack their skates away forever realizing that door isn’t going to open. It is a sad consequence of the pressure many athletes feel but are afraid to admit.

The lottery ticket for a chance at a D1 scholarship comes at a much steeper price than the two dollars you spend at the convenience store. Many parents today have literally bought into the dream, investing an obscene amount of time, money and family sacrifice.

Money Well Spent in Pursuit of the D1 Dream?

The short walk or drive to the outdoor rink has been replaced by the grind of an endless hockey highway, filled with billboards and toll booths promising a guaranteed path to the dream of going pro. They sell exposure and top-level competition while slowly stealing away unstructured ice time and crowding out family birthdays, worship, and school. The financial price spins upward like the national debt, as families write checks to skills coaches instead of spending time in the garage or backyard. 

And like gullible toddlers, many parents buy the hype and guarantees of advisors who peddle the D1 dream regardless of the odds. If you are banking upon recouping your investment in the form of a scholarship, bear in mind that less than 1% of all D1 athletes receive a full ride, regardless of the sport.  

You don’t have to stay at a Holiday Inn Express to know that if you aren’t good enough, no amount of exposure will change a coach’s mind. That won’t stop a stable of elite programs from trying to convince you that you must leave home to get the exposure you need. 

And that leads us to the social, emotional, and family toll that comes when we ship our kids off to live with someone else, instead of allowing them to experience high school in their hometown with their families and childhood friends. I am sure billet families can be wonderful people with their hearts in the right place, but the responsibility of raising kids belongs to their parents. 

Crazy old-school thinking, I know.

Focus on Building Good Character

This financial foot race doesn’t always focus on building good character—things like manners; respect; the ability to have a conversation with an adult; looking people in the eye; and accepting responsibility. Sometimes the priorities become toe-drags, goal totals and the number of elite team jerseys accumulated or skill development camps attended in one summer. The vital task of building confidence can turn into building arrogance, entitlement, and fabricated confidence.

Mark Johnson, former NHL player and coach of the University of Wisconsin–Madison women’s hockey team, told me in my interview with him last summer, “I think as parents we are looking for tools and sometimes, we must take a backseat and say does this make sense, is this going to help and is there a purpose to it?” 

Or is it another unnecessary expensive carrot driven by FOMO?

With the speed and flashy talk of a carnival barker, this skill-development craze has convinced us that you can’t learn unless you are being coached. That training twelve months of the year is required to make the dream of going pro come true. It’s the narrative that fills the pockets of the hockey player-development madness, but has bankrupted the hockey sense we used to develop for free. 

Unstructured play is as rare as a pair of Cooperall hockey pants. 

Choices to Make

To be clear, each family has the right to chase that dream however they see fit. 

I don’t want any young athletes to stop dreaming. But I do wish parents would stop believing they are the determining factor in making that dream a reality. If the premium-priced path was the key to the dream of going pro, then any player who followed it would succeed. 

It’s the player, not the path, that delivers the D1 dream that can ultimately lead to the NHL. 

Those that have the financial resources to follow the money trail will always exist. I just want families to understand that there are alternate paths that don’t require a king’s ransom, traveling across the country, or shipping your child off to be raised by someone else.

According to Coach Johnson, who knows a thing or two about hockey, “Yeah, if you’re good enough somebody’s gonna see you.”

The real dream for parents should be that your child learns all the valuable lessons that this experience provides, free of charge. That they grow up with you and their siblings and take pride in playing for their hometown. And that finally, this great game becomes engrained in their life, and at age 40 they are still playing in a pick-up league or giving back to the game as an official, coach, or youth board member.

Or a sane hockey parent.

That’s the dream. And it’s not a wild one, but it is attainable for all who pursue it. 

Dan Bauer is a freelance writer, retired teacher and coach in Wausau, Wis.  You can follow him on Facebook at Lockeroom Logic, or contact him at  drbauer13@gmail.com