Major junior hockey players can now join NCAA Division I teams; stakeholders weigh in [Video]

Through four seasons with the Prince Albert Raiders, Max Hildebrand has dressed for more than 100 games. And despite being a 13th-round pick in the 2019 prospects draft, he has become one of the Western Hockey League’s most consistent goaltenders.

Now thanks to a seismic shift in the North American junior hockey landscape, the 20-year-old Martensville, Sask. product has become the first WHL player from Saskatchewan in recent history to commit to an NCAA Division I program.

That shift was a decision by the National Collegiate Athletics Association to drop a previously iron-clad stance barring players in the Canadian Hockey League — of which the WHL is a member — from the association’s member schools. The reason for the ban? A long-standing policy that deemed major-junior athletes “professionals” for receiving monthly stipends from their teams.

“It was a crazy couple weeks there leading up to the rule change,” Hildebrand said. “[Bemidji State University] had been in contact …