Alumni take on social media recruiting effort to woo hockey players to Alberta Golden Bears

In the wake of new recruiting rules pulling players from the University of Alberta Golden Bears, some alumni are teaming up to help draw in athletes.

Alumni from the University of Alberta’s men’s hockey team have taken on a new role: recruiter.

New eligibility rules that came into play this season are seeing more hockey players opt to play Division 1 college hockey in the U.S. over junior hockey leagues in Canada. It’s those junior leagues from which the Golden Bears and their fellow Canadian university teams have traditionally tapped for their rosters.

That has changed over the last year, ever since the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the U.S. announced in November last year that it was lifting a long-standing ban on players who played in one of Canada’s three major junior hockey circuits – the Western, Ontario and Quebec – that make up the umbrella Canadian Hockey League (CHL).

The floodgates opened, with College Hockey Insider reporting nearly 325 CHL players committing to U.S. colleges for the 2025-26 season and beyond.

The Golden Bears have had to look further afield to recruit new talent, including tier-two junior and junior ‘A’ leagues as well as internationally.

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Stan Marple, the team’s general manager and assistant coach, said what happens over the longer term remains to be seen, but he’s hopeful the U of A will be able to draw more major junior players to its roster.

“I think there are going to be a lot of players initially that want to give the NCAA a go no matter what, but I think there are also players, especially local players, that may want to come back,” Marple told CTV News Edmonton on Monday. “Each NCAA team is allowed 26 guys on full scholarships, and you can only dress 20 a game, so there are still lots of players there that might be looking to come back to USport (Canadian university athletics) within the next year or two.”

In the meantime, the exodus of major junior players to U.S. colleges is something in which the team’s alumni, which claims 600 members, has taken an active interest, says Rick Peterson, its board’s vice-president.

“We want to make sure that we help the team and we help the university get word out about this amazing program, so that when a junior hockey player thinks about what his career could be like post-junior, he’s got options,” Peterson, a centreman who played for the Golden Bears from 1972-75, told CTV News Edmonton.

There’s spreading the word person to person, of course, but Peterson said the alumni have delved into social media, hiring a coordinator to “try to get as much attention as we can of the Canadian Hockey League players and their teams, and eventually the players themselves.”

“We can be sure that every time we come across a young player, we tell them about our program, but we thought, ‘Junior hockey players are between the ages of 16 and 20. What’s the best way to reach out to these guys?’” Peterson said. “It’s social media.”

He said the online effort started six weeks ago, resulting in “a tremendous amount of interest” and “great feedback.”

“Followers are building, and ... we’re turning (our message) around. We’re saying, ‘Do you got what it takes to be a Golden Bear? Do you have what it takes to be here and to be part of what we’ve built here? Do you have what it takes? Because if you do, you’ve got to have a look at coming here.”

The selling points are not only the team’s history and championship pedigree – 16 national titles and 56 Canada West conference titles – but the relationships made and the leadership lessons learned.

“It’s important that we tell everybody who’s looking at coming to the U of A that this is more than just a winning team,” Peterson said. “These are values that are going to stay with you all your life. These are relationships that are going to stay with you all your life. And this is a winning attitude that’s going to stay with you in every single thing you do.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nahreman Issa and The Associated Press