Team-First Mindset with David Carle
Willy Walker:
Welcome to another Walker Webcast. As all Walker Webcast listeners know, the majority of our topics are on the macroeconomy, on business leadership, commercial real estate.
Every once in a while, I dive off into areas of both personal interest as well as interest in leadership and how people lead military operations, how people lead states, cities, and hockey teams. It is my great pleasure to have the University of Denver hockey coach, David Carle, join me today for the Walker Webcast. I have watched Coach Carle really take the University of Denver from being one of the very best Division I men's hockey programs in the nation to really operating on a different level from anybody else.
As you will hear in Coach Carle's bio, he has done more in his early career at the University of Denver than most coaches would hope to do in an entire career, and is really being looked at as a truly unique coach in the college ranks. We'll talk about hockey versus football, basketball, and a bunch of other things, and all the rule changes that are going on today, Coach Carle. But first of all, it's a real pleasure to have you join me today, and thank you for taking the time.
Coach Carle:
Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to chatting with you today and appreciate diving into one of your interests in college hockey.
Willy Walker:
I do have a pretty good interest. I think I may have mentioned to you a number of years ago when I first met you that Coach Greg Carvel was one of my really good buddies back in undergrad at St. Lawrence. He had St. Lawrence at the top of the ECAC and then was poached away to UMass, where he went on to win a national championship. Carvel and I have been great friends for a very long period of time. My Walker Webcast with Carvel, which is probably now about four or five years, when the last time he won the national championship, is one of those conversations that I continuously have clients and listeners come back and say, man, that conversation with Carvel about college hockey was really so fascinating. When I saw the opportunity to bring you on, I said, I got to get Coach Carle on because what you've done, as I said previously, at the University of Denver is really quite spectacular.
Coach Carle:
Well, thank you. Sounds like I have big shoes to fill with Carvel. Hopefully, we can do that.
Willy Walker:
Great. Let me just, real quick, give listeners, Coach, a little bit of background. Your record at DU is 208, 85, and 20, which gives you a winning percentage of 0.696. As I think about that, one of the other pieces is your NCAA tournament record is 14 and 3, which is unbelievable, with 3 titles and 6 Frozen Four berths in your 8 seasons as head coach of the University of Denver. You got your 200th win earlier this season. That win percentage of almost 700 puts you right up there as one of the winningest coaches in NCAA college hockey history.
I can't help, Coach, but do a little bit of a comparison between you and John Wooden and Nick Saban as it relates to two luminaries in men's basketball and football. Wooden's lifetime win record was 808, so 0.808, and Saban was 0.804. We've got about 100 basis points of win percentage that we got to get, Coach, to get you up into that pantheon. But talk for a moment about the program that you've implemented at Denver.
The way that you, when you meet with a recruit to bring them into Denver, you're obviously, there's 64 D1 hockey programs. You compete. I'm in Boston today. Boston is a hockey town. They got the Beanpot every winter that has BU, BC, Harvard, and Northeastern all going at it in the garden with a really great atmosphere. Yet you're successful at, if you will, recruiting against Boston and Hockey East and the Big Ten. How is it that you've been so successful at bringing such great talent to the University of Denver?
Coach Carle:
That's a loaded question. There are certainly a number of reasons why I believe that we're successful, our program's successful. But I think the, I guess something you might hear me say a lot today, or that we can dive into is I think ultimately our program, a lot of people say it, I think it's within us a little bit more ingrained than others, but we really do believe that nobody's bigger than the program. It's been around for 76 years. We've only had nine head coaches since year 2000. We've won the most championships all time, but since year 2000, we've won the most championships with six. We've had three head coaches in that time period. All three head coaches have won a championship.
To me, the names on the back of the jersey change, maybe the people behind the bench change, athletic directors change, student body changes, but there's something really special and unique about Denver that's kind of ingrained within certainly how George Gwazdeki operated as he was a coach for the 0405 title teams. Jim Montgomery eventually took over, won a championship in 2017. Then obviously we've been fortunate enough to win three of the last five.
I think really a stitching through it all is just how nobody really cares about their own personal egos and who gets the credits. I think, again, a lot of that in what we kind of display around our space would be who I think is the John Wooden of college hockey is Murray Armstrong. He's really the grandfather and the founder of the godfather of Denver hockey, won five championships starting back in 1958 through 1969.
And I think at least for me, and I know my predecessors, we just feel like we're trying to do our part and keep the train on the tracks, if you will, in many respects. There's a lot of like specific reasons why we're successful that certainly we can get into. But I think that's really the overarching thing.
I think that philosophy and, I guess culture kind of permeates throughout our locker room and certainly into recruiting. We're constantly looking for players and people, probably, more importantly, that want to that aren't coming to Denver because of what we've done, but they're coming to Denver to add to what we've done. And they want to win that's primary.
For us, we believe in life. You can certainly win and develop all at the same time. So we've got a lot of NHL draft picks and really good players that have gone on to make NHL careers and debuts, but they are addicted and hungry to add to what Denver hockey is all about.
It's a great place to work, and it's a really special place to be. I couldn't be more blessed to be in the role I'm in.
Willy Walker:
You talked about the ‘04-’05 team. Your brother was on those national championship teams and went on to win the Hobie Baker Award. What did your parents feed you at dinner in Anchorage, Alaska as you guys were growing up to make you and your brother such incredible athletes?
Coach Carle:
It was a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken, to be honest. My parents, they own and operate KFC stores back in Alaska. My family business, our great uncle, started and owned back in the 80s and 70s. My dad bought the business from his uncle, my great uncle, in the early 90s. And my brother was born in ‘84. I was born in ‘89. Then our younger brother, Alex, was born in ‘94.
We all grew up working in the commissary, working in the stores, every team event, party. It was trays of chicken getting brought in in the Colonel’s secret recipe. That was a big part of it, for sure. And again, very fortunate to grow up in the way that we did.
Willy Walker:
What was the hockey angle, though? Did your dad play hockey? Because, I mean, Anchorage, Alaska, isn't exactly considered a hotbed of youth hockey players. What got you and your brother on that track to be able to be D1 hockey players?
Coach Carle:
Our parents, they could maybe tell you they know how to skate, but they don't know how to skate. Parents never played the sport. My dad's one of four boys.
He's in the middle. Some of his brothers had kids before him that were older, and they got into hockey. We had older cousins that played a little bit. That's how Matthew got involved. And again, you're in Alaska, it's probably the one sport that you have access to the most. Our football season, not very long. Our baseball season starts a little bit later. And soccer, just not a huge thing up there.
So the other thing I would say is we did have a lot of role models within our community. Scott Gomez was playing in the NHL, Ty Conklin, Brian Swanson, someone that we grew up, he played at CC that I know my brother really enjoyed. We had UAA hockey playing out of the Sullivan Arena. They were in the old WCHA. We got to see Denver and Minnesota and North Dakota, and Wisconsin come into the Sullivan Arena, and our parents had season tickets to those games. So we grew up just running around the Sully and getting to watch Vanek and the Gophers, and obviously the great North Dakota teams of the 90s.
It was really, honestly, a great place to grow up and fall in love with hockey. And my brother Matthew ended up leaving and going to play at the U.S. National Team Development Program when he was 15. I left at 15 to go play at Shattuck-St. Mary's in Minnesota. Then our little brother Alex, he left around the same age and went to a prep school at Kimball Union out east. We all left home at the age of 15-16 to pursue it. Alex ended up at a Merrimack, Division I scholarship, and Matthew and I both ended up going to Denver.
Willy Walker:
Do you think you'd be the coach you are if your playing career hadn't ended when it did as it relates to kind of the perspective of watching the game in college rather than playing the game in college?
Coach Carle:
I would tell you I would hopefully have went on to play for a number of years. And, coaching might be something that got on my radar. But truthfully, when I got into it, I was just forced into it due to the heart condition.
It really wasn't until my junior year of college at Denver, so my third year into coaching that it became a real consideration of something that I could or would or should do full time. And life's very fortuitous sometimes. I mean, it's so much about timing. I had the right guy in the right job in Green Bay, and Derek Milan to recruit me to Denver. He had an assistant coach opening when my senior year ended. I had interviewed for a couple of other jobs, didn’t get them, they had an opening and hired me to come work with him.
And the same can be said with Denver. Job opened up way sooner than I would ever thought and was really fortunate. Jim Montgomery hired me and tried to get some head coaching jobs during the five years of working with Monty.
Didn't get any of them. Monty leaves to go to Dallas and Denver hires me at the age of 28. So there's so many things in your life that have to go your way that are out of your control, as well as being ready to capitalize on those opportunities and moments.
I think that's what makes sports… so many life skills come from sports. You look at our goalie this year, Johnny Hicks. I mean, he didn't get started game until the end of January. He had to bide his time, wait for his opportunity. Then once your opportunity opens, it's your job to be ready to strike. There was a lot that it was out of his control prior to getting that first start. Then once it got into his control he didn't let go of the horns. I think there's a lot to learn there, and life skills, and whether it's business, sport, life in general you have to be ready to cash in on your opportunities.
Willy Walker:
You look like you're in good shape. Does your heart condition prevent you from doing strenuous exercise or do you get plenty of exercise off the ice when you're skating around with the players, coaching them?
Coach Carle:
My condition does not really limit me to physical activity in any respect. Activity good diet allows me to hopefully stay healthy and kick around for a few more years. Also, I don't have a super severe, I would say, version of the condition. For me, that's really nice as well. I'm very, again, lucky and blessed that it's not something more severe there. There's a lot more different permutations of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that I know of and know people with. For me, again, fortunately, it's a pretty asymptomatic case or has been for the last 18 years, and hopefully continues to stay that way.
Willy Walker:
I had a bike accident a couple of weeks ago and hit my head pretty badly, and had a pretty bad concussion. As I've been trying to recover from it, and I'm feeling a lot better now than I have been for the last two weeks. I kept looking at my whoop scores and my group recovery scores. What was so interesting about it was even though I was getting the same amount of exercise as normal, eating the same as I normally would, not drinking as I normally do, my recovery scores stayed in the red. It was just kind of telling me that my body was trying to get back online, even though everything else was held static, and it was just the recovery from the concussion. It was so interesting to be able to see the numbers behind the physiology from the Whoop strap as I was during that recovery period.
Do you do anything as it relates to monitoring your players' performance from either a whoop or anything else standpoint to be able to see how they're doing either from a strain or recovery standpoint?
Coach Carle:
Matt Shaw is the head of our sports performance department. He oversees all their lifting, training, recovery all of our science-based kind of tracking tools and things that we use.
The main tracker that we use is called Catapult. They wear kind of a halter type thing that holds a little small little thing and tracker on their back. That's really what we use to try and measure their force output during practice. Matt and I, we've been using it for probably 12 years or so now. We have a really good sense of what we're looking to do week to week, but measures high force skating strides, measures total volume, can measure asymmetries or dissymmetries between your left and your right side. If your right leg's working more than your left leg, just all these kind of cool little quirks and things that Matt can dive into each individual player data and look for things that might be red flags for them.
For me, team-wide is what I look at, just our kind of our team scores and team loads. And ultimately, a lot of times people say practice seems harder or should be harder than games. It's kind of weird because practice isn't as long and games are much longer, but really what it gets down to is you have your total player load on a day that might be, you won't know the numbers, but 120 on a Monday, then we might go up to 160 on a Tuesday and then 140 on a Wednesday, 110 on a Thursday, and then the games are going to spike to like 250 to 275.
But what it also tracks is the player load per minute. During practice, the player load per minute is much higher. It's, it's very high. Then, a player load per minute on a game is much lower. The games seem easier physically a lot of times than practice because the duration of practice is shorter, but if you were to do a practice, as long as you were to do a game, the player load would be well above 300.
There are all these different as he talks about it, you want to have a variety within your training. If we were to just hit, say, the number 140 for four straight days and then spike to 250 on a game day, there's a lot more risk of injury. It's so different. If you were to get in the weight room and do the same workout four straight days, and then on Friday, do something completely different a CrossFit workout, when all you've been doing is squats, sit-ups, and bench press for four straight days, very elementary static kind of lifts. Then you were to go into a CrossFit workout on Friday, full bore, your chance of injury is very, very high. But if you're varying kind of what you're doing in those lifts Monday through Thursday, you kind of keep your body guessing. It keeps it more, I guess, elastic and able to adjust and take on different stress loads.
That's a lot of how we work in sports science. We used to, many of our players individually will have whoops or different tracking things. Matt has at times, we don't do it every year, which kind of weight every couple of years, we'll go on and off of things just because I think sometimes it's good to have variety with your team and people.
We'll do heart rate variability studies and exercises, that's a real good indicator of your sleep, your recovery, your readiness within your heart rate variability, and what that is, just the beats, the time between beats, and what's the distance between them. Is it symmetrical? Is it varied? 2/10 of a second difference can be a lot, as that kind of shifts throughout a minute. Anyway, so we certainly do do a lot of that. Matt does a lot of force plate testing on a weekly basis. He can see guys and try to pick up data points to, again, early intervention, I think, is critical for our players on their weight, on their force plate testing. If those numbers start to drop, we can quickly intervene and just say, have a conversation. How are you feeling? Is there something going on? Do you need more support? We want our athletes to be as healthy as possible, certainly so that they're available to be at their best.
Willy Walker:
First of all, does that topic come up much when you're doing recruiting meetings with players and families, that whole kind of side of it in the sense of, is the real kind of like, how's my kid going to make it onto the NHL? Why is he going to fit into DU or whatever the case? Or do they talk a lot more about those what I would deem to be kind of derivative or somewhat outside of the main line? Are they focused on that type of stuff?
Coach Carle:
They are. I think kids are more in tune today than they ever have been on their bodies and training and what they put in their bodies and what the output is. We have a lot of our kids that come in we want them to spend 30 to 45 minutes a mat down in his space, walk the space. He can show them the tools. Every day after practice, the staff gets a catapult report. We can see the total volume of each drill, the player load per minute per drill. We can see it by defensemen, by forward. We can also see how long each drill was. Sometimes we have an idea as coaches of gosh, this drill, that seemed really short, and then you look at the sheet, and you're like, well, that was like nine minutes.
That's really long, or that seemed really fast. Like, there's some drills that we do that are very quick, and there's some drills, it's only truly 90 seconds to two and a half minutes. Some of the drills that we do that are continuous to the rep count, to get the high force skating.
Matt can go through kind of all that on the sports science side. We really say that Matt is style of play, how we play, skills on ice. Yes. All that's very important, but becoming really good friends with Matt Shaw is going to be your number one indicator and number one key to getting your body ready to play at the pro level and hopefully make it into the NHL.
Willy Walker:
When I think about, first of all, Magness, it's an incredible hockey arena. When it was built, it was truly one of the great arenas in the country. Your competitor schools have built beautiful arenas and North Dakota's, I've never been there, but my understanding is that North Dakota's arena is really quite something.
But you're competing against the Michigan and Ohio State and BC and BU and other universities that have, A) not only lots of resources, really nice stadiums. The travel between their home rink and the visitor's home rink, if you will, or their other league members, is a fraction of the distance between Denver and places like Sioux City and other rinks that you all need to travel to.
How, other than obviously, you've got the University of Denver calling card of the great track record, but you've, A) focused very much, coach, on recruiting straight out of the juniors and not leaning on, if you will, or focusing on the transfer portal. Love to understand why that, rather than going to the transfer portal that has been the producer of a lot of talent that has moved from one school to the next. Then secondly, just sort of, when I think about you recruiting against Michigan, who you beat in the national semifinal, and had a great team, and boy, that was an incredible game that you all won.
You think about Michigan having won the basketball championship the week before, and all the resources that a university like Michigan has. Here's DU that has really a lot of great D1 sports, but on basketball, not really a big competitor, no football team. I sit there and say, man, how did coach Carle do it to recruit such great talent to Denver when the competitive set is so competitive at other schools?
If you would, let me bifurcate that of, A) players straight out of juniors into there rather than relying on the portal. Then second of all, just kind of the competitive landscape as it relates to recruiting. You had 10 freshmen on the team this year. I think I was correct on that.
Coach Carle:
I did.
Willy Walker:
You had the sixth-youngest roster in all of NCAA hockey this year.
Coach Carle:
Yeah, and this is actually the oldest of our three teams that won in the last five years.
Willy Walker:
It's unbelievable.
Coach Carle:
The teams in ‘22 and ‘24 were the second-youngest teams in the country. We had 11 freshmen on one and nine on another. I think, like so much things in life, you lean upon your lived experience to kind of formulate opinions, ideas, and plans.
With the transfer portal I think when it was originally introduced, for us, it started, it felt like it became a thing in ‘19, ‘20, 2021 seasons, kind of in that time period. I would tell you our first go at it was the 2021 season. We had three transfers, all nice kids. But the fact of the matter is, it did not go that well for us. I just think it's a hard place. Maybe it's unique to us. I don't know. Or maybe we're just not good at assimilating them or culturally, it just doesn't work as well.
But I would say that transfers, a lot of times, you're having to, they want very tangible, promises, might be a good word, as to what they're going to get.
They've been through the process before on the first go around, maybe even they've been through it twice, because maybe there's a decommitment and a recommitment to another school. And now they're a little bit older, a little bit wiser. They can see through the BS, and they're looking for straight talk on what's my role going to be? What do you have for me? Now it's getting even more complicated as you involve money into the situation. Five, six years ago, that wasn't a thing. It was just, hey, what's my role on the team going to be?
Later on, we had a player that we brought in, he was four to the year in another league. And we thought we were getting this real plug-and-play player.
We slotted him on our top line on day one. And he didn't produce for like eight games, and we just kept trying it. He's on the power plays, on our first line, he's getting opportunity after opportunity. He's not making, cashing in, or doing anything with it. He's new to the culture, new to the program. He's starting to get outwardly frustrated at his lack of personal success, and the other guys see it and they've been a part of the program for one, two, three years. I think in their minds, like, why is this guy getting all this opportunity, all this rope?
We're eight games in, and we got returners kind of looking at us like, what are we doing here? So you start to move them down because you're like, well, the results aren't there. We're going to move other people and try those spots. Then with him, it's like, well do you not believe in me now? And you told me that this is the opportunity I would have.
It was really challenging, truthfully, to manage a situation, in my opinion, with kind of our core values and what we believe in, and trying to develop people, teams, and players. So the next time we did it was our ‘21-’22 team. That was the first time we did, we did three, we're like threes a lot. ‘21-’22, we only brought one in, and we were very upfront and direct with him as to what went wrong the first time.
He was very open-minded, understanding, like, we are starting you lower in our lineup. Our goal and expectation for you is to move up our lineup, but you have to earn it from us. But you also, more importantly, you have to earn it from your teammates. He was awesome. His name's Cam Wright. He came from Bowling Green, did a fifth year with us, scored 20 goals for us, scored a huge goal in the regional and in the Michigan game, I believe in ‘22, he had a tip goal as well. And he was the first guy to do our bike test. He was around in the summertime. He just really took what we had to say, and it just made it a lot easier. He gained his teammates' trust and respect right away. It worked very well.
Then, since him we added to, after our ‘24 team, Eric Polkamp, we had on the world junior team when I was coaching that group. I had a little bit of a sense of him initially, and Samu Salminen and transferred from UConn, but he was committed to Denver the first go around, got into academic issues, getting into school. We knew the player, both Eric and Samuel, were on this past year's championship.
Again, it's not that we don't do it. We're just very selective. I think it's also very nice to be able to say to families, look at our roster building as it relates to other teams around the country. Not only do we want to bring freshmen in, we brought in 11, and then 9, and then 10, and we won with those teams. We're not afraid to bring in freshmen. We believe you can win with them.
I think when you're sitting across the table or on the phone or Zoom call with a family you have a lot more credibility to sit here and say, we want your son to come. We want to develop them. You have to trust us. We're not going to bring someone out of the portal who's three years older and recruit over top of your son and then break that and fracture that trust in that relationship.
That to me is probably really what it's all about. There's a proof of concept for us that it's challenging. There's a proof of concept that you can do it in moments, and it works. Then there's certainly a proof of concept with having a lot of freshmen on your team. We're very confident and bullish on the players that we can bring in as freshmen out of junior hockey that we can develop them. They can come to Denver, and they can be wildly successful immediately and then certainly progress in their careers.
I think that's a big part of what's given us success. I would also say that it's good when you're, it's kind of maybe gets into the next thing, but we're a very small institution as it relates to the big public schools and state flagships. If you can differentiate yourself within a marketplace and try and stand out, generally that's going to serve you well. Trying to do what everybody else is doing generally doesn't work, even if it's being different is really good in our opinion. We try and be different with that. And I think it works well for us when we're having those conversations with families.
How do we do it against the other schools? Kind of like you asked. The reality is that the portfolio of college hockey is very, very diverse. I've spoken on this a few times, but you do have the Power Two or Power Four schools in the seven Big Ten schools, you have Boston College, who's a part of the ACC, and then you have Arizona State as well. That's nine schools out of 64 belong in that tier where they have big-time football and basketball and all the resources of Power Four.
Then you've got a lot probably, I wouldn't even say the bottom, just like not the bigger, so it's a lot bigger, not better. Then you have schools like us that are Division One, non-football. You have schools like North Dakota, Division One, with FCS football. Minnesota-Duluth is Division One hockey with Division Two football. Colorado College is Division One hockey with Division One women's soccer, everything else D3. Omaha is very similar to us. You have the Ivies, which is about 7 to 10 schools. You just have a real wide swath. You got Mac schools in Miami, Western Michigan. So you have this real swath of schools that the offerings are very unique and different.
There are a ton of players. We just got 60 teams' worth of players in the CHL that are now eligible in addition to everything we were recruiting previous to that in the USHL and in Europe, and Canadian Tier Two leagues.
Truthfully, there's a lot of funneling. The base that we're recruiting from is really large, and then we're funneling it to this. Even if bigger was better, okay, there are nine schools that are in that mix. There's way more than nine teams' worth of players to be able to recruit and to be able to build solid teams. And of those nine, I mean, seven of them are in the same conference. Notre Dame had an awful year in the Big Ten. They finished seventh. Do they look attractive to families? I mean, yes, a great education. There are a lot of good things about Notre Dame, but if you want to win, you're probably not going to Notre Dame right now.
Those seven schools playing a conference where they beat up on each other, and the best they can go as a group of seven is 500. It creates these pockets and inefficiencies within the marketplace where teams in the NCHC, again, we have nine teams. We're going to have we have four teams in the NCAA tournament. The CCHA, almost I think they had one team in, but they almost had three or four teams in. You have BC didn't make the tournament this year. BU didn't make the tournament this year.
There's a lot of, I would say a lot of variance within it, and how we are then broken up into six conferences, I think, creates a natural competitiveness and also inefficiencies within the marketplace on top of we have a great institution to come to academically. It's a great city. It's obviously full of tradition hockey-wise. We really care about hockey. I would say another way to think about it is people know about the University of Denver because of Denver Pioneer Hockey.
People know about Ohio State Hockey because they're part of Ohio State. The flagship is the school. At our school, the athletic programs and certainly the hockey program is the front door and the entry point into our university. Whereas at a lot of these big places, you know about them for many, many other reasons before you, oh, they have a hockey program. I didn't know that.
That's cool. There's a lot of kids and families that want to come to a hockey school where hockey is a primary focus, and they can get a great education and they can have a great social experience, and they can move on, and they can win.
Really long answer for you, but I mean, that's a big part of it. Just knowing the totality of the ecosystem, I think no different than I'm sure any of your other guests or anything. You have to know your marketplace in order to find where you can be successful within your niche. I think that's, again, what's made us successful is where we recruit, how we recruit. It really hasn't changed a lot in the last 60 years. It's Western North America sprinkled in with a little bit of Scandic countries. We live in those markets, and we found really good people that are really good players, and they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
Willy Walker:
You clearly don't lose many games to other programs, and the track record works, speaks for itself, as it relates to the program that you lose recruits to. Are you willing to diverge? I always sit around, and people sit there and say Walker and Dunlop, they compete with CBRE and JLL and all these other big services firms in the commercial real estate space.
The way to really understand who we compete with is who we lose deal flow to. That's really the competitive set. It's not so much that they do this or do that. It's like we just went out and tried to finance an asset for them and we lost to whomever or whatever. That's, in my view, the real competitive threat. That's who we really compete with on a day-to-day basis.
When you're going up for student athletes, you win more than you lose. But is there one program that you're like, darn it, every once in a while they're the ones who keep showing up?
Coach Carle:
Yes and no. We compete in the same, I would say, end of the pool as a lot of the teams that we've talked about. What our specific record is recruiting-wise against those schools, I can't sit here and say we lose every battle to school X or we win every battle against school X.
I think a lot of times it really does, whether it's Michigan or BU, BC, Notre Dame, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Minnesota, North Dakota, Duluth. It really comes down to all those schools are so different. I've spoken to this, and maybe we'll get into it, but everyone wants to talk about the money in college athletics. Again, my view and sense of it is, if you want to go to a big state school and go to football games, and it's between Denver and Michigan State, you're going to pick Michigan State. It really doesn't, in my opinion; it's not going to matter if we offer $75,000 and they offer $25,000. It's not a big enough, when you're thinking about the future of contracts and your earning potential in your career, you're not going to pick a place that you don't fit at over a five-figure number. Truthfully, even a low six-figure number, I don't think a lot of kids and families are going to do that.
Again, as I kind of sit here and all those schools I mentioned, it's really just trying to dive into what is the experience they are looking for? What do you want out of your college experience? Is the big school important? Is getting to the NHL, the only a number one thing is, do you want to be a part of something bigger than yourself? Do you want to win in college? Do you want to be in an NHL city? Do you not want to be in an NHL city? Do you want a business degree? Do you want to be taught by a TA or by your professor? What do you value? That's really what we try to get into with kids and families.
You can learn pretty early on if you're in the mix or not. Again, you talk about deal flow and people you work with; again, it's more than the numbers. It is a people business, whatever we are doing in any given industry in life. As much as AI and different things want to come into play, life is still going to be a people business. Anyways, that I think is just really, really critical and important as we try and meet families and meet kids and talk to their agents and their teams and figure out who's going to fit in at Denver. We try to be as blatantly honest as we can be.
With that, we get just as excited when kids don't pick us, as when they do pick us. Because if we lay out who we are and they want to go somewhere else, then good for them. There's a lot of good fits that'll fit for them.
If they're not a fit for us, then they shouldn't come to Denver. I think you filter a lot of that on the front end, very diligently. Then it keeps a lot of your guys out of the portal, allows you to keep that continuity and that roster construction in a more stable place, and hopefully allows you to compete, year in and year out, for championships.
Willy Walker:
How early can you make offers to, I know hockey is a little bit different in the sense that in football and basketball, there is no juniors. In hockey, many kids go from a high school program to playing juniors before coming to college hockey, and almost all on your roster.
But how early can you give someone an offer to come to DU? Can you recruit a freshman in high school and give them an offer to come, or do you have to wait until they're a senior in high school?
Coach Carle:
Good question. Every sport's different. The NCAA, it's one of the good things they've done in the last little while here is they've given a lot more autonomy to each individual sport and coaching bodies to kind of build out their own recruiting calendars.
We're down in Bonita Springs, Florida at our coaches convention this week. It is a hot topic. Age-based eligibility is coming into play, which will have arguably the biggest impact on college hockey because we have delayed enrollment.
Willy Walker:
Just so people who are listening understand that, the NCAA put out that you've got five years of eligibility starting at 19 years old. You can only play till you're 24. Am I correct on that quick read of the rule?
Coach Carle:
It's the day you graduate or when you turn 19, whichever comes first. If you're on a normal track, like most hockey players, are graduating at the age of 18, your five-year clock will start after you graduate. That's going to throw quite a wrench into our ecosystem to which nothing's totally been finalized, but it appears it is. Certainly, we're very much against it as a body because hockey does not have a high school model that basketball, football, and other sports do, where you can play locally within the area you grew up at a really high and competitive level due to geographics and just sheer numbers of volume of players.
What ultimately happens is like myself and my brothers, we leave home at the age of 15, 16 years old. We didn't even go play junior hockey. We went to play high school hockey. Then from there we would go to junior hockey. We left even earlier than most kids.
Really what's going to happen is we're going to have to recruit younger players. Kids are going to have to leave home earlier because they're not going to have access to high-level hockey in the state of Colorado or Texas at the age of 17 years old when they're junior, senior in high school. They're going to have to leave earlier. Then they're going to have to come into college earlier. The system will sort itself out, but I think Charlie Baker's really missing on this as it relates to the impacts on youth sports and college hockey and kids having to leave their homes a lot earlier outside of Minnesota and really the Northeast. It's really challenging to play high-level hockey all the way in your hometown up until the age of 18. That's going to be a major change coming to our sport. That'll be a real challenge that we're all trying to wrap our heads around right now.
Ultimately, it's 18. It's when you graduate or when you turn 19, whichever comes first, is when your five-year clock will start. You've got five years, no waivers, no exceptions to be able to compete. You're going to look at, there'll be a group of kids that are in the ecosystem right now that are 19 years old, and they wanted to play their 19-year-old year of junior, and they want to come to college as 20-year-olds.
But by the time the rules change, they're only going to have three years of eligibility left because they graduated at the age of 18. I understand how it's, again, we get lost sometimes in the NCAA world with what's most important for football. It's unfortunate that this will probably be the biggest change we've had to face, truthfully, bigger change than RepShare, NIL, and the Transfer Portal, in my opinion.
Willy Walker:
On NIL, coach, my understanding is that you've basically taken that money and, if you will, paid it evenly across your team and not sat there and said, okay, you're my star center, and you're going to make this, and you're my third string, third line center, and you're going to make that, and not delineated between them. Yet, some other programs, I believe, there's a player at Penn State who has a high six-figure NIL deal. How are you approaching that? Do you have an advantage, given the success of your program, that allows you to not break out of the paying everyone the same and having, if you will, gradations between their benefits to NILs?
Coach Carle:
I mean, again, kind of a deeper conversation in some respects. Truthfully, it's a little bit of, at least with us, it's a misnomer that we are in control of NIL money. Name, image, and likeness is the players profiting off their own name, image, and likeness.
Really, that all has to be done via an outside collective, which has to be an LLC. It can't have 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. If we don't have an NIL collective in Denver, we don't have an outside entity that pays our players, which we could have done it two, three years ago. We chose not to do it. I can get into why on that as we go here. But ultimately, if we did have one, you play for our team, you come in, the NIL collective is going give you $5,000. You're going to sign a contract with them. But then you have to, anything above $600 that you get from the collective or any name, image, and likeness deal, whether it's with a Toyota dealership or your equipment deal, you have to sign a contract. That contract has to be submitted to a third party, which is overseen by Deloitte with the NCAA.
They're going to analyze that contract. They're going to say, yep, $5,000. He did an appearance and a couple posts. Good to go. We approve of it. That number is $50,000. And you only do one small little thing. They have the ability and the autonomy to strike down that deal and say it's not equal pay for the service given. Equal pay is the wrong word, but it doesn't meet the standard.
The other challenging part, especially as relates to hockey is internationally. If you were from Canada or from Finland, say, you would have to get that money paid, that $5,000 would have to go into your home country's bank account. Can't be a U.S. based bank account. If you're from Helsinki, it has to go to a Finnish bank account. The services that you do for the collective have to be done in your home country. That gets really challenging.
There's a lot of hoops to jump through, and certainly, schools and collectives are doing it. The flip side to the NIL world is the revenue share option. What that is, is any school that opted in, is they're allowed to revenue share up to $20.5 million with student athletes across their department, however they see fit. At a place like Penn State, where's that $20.5 million going to go. It's going to go to football. It's going to go to basketball, and the advantage of rev share dollars is you can take money in from donors.
You're a 501(c)(3), we all are as institutions. You can take money in from donors that is for revenue sharing. I can pay you $5,000 in revenue share dollars. You can sign a contract on that or whatever, but there's no oversight to that. It's just, we're just sharing revenue with you. There's none of the hoops that you have to deal with, with the outside collective. And you have the 501(c)(3) status and the school is in control of it.
So, as a school like Denver, we don't have big-time football. We are never going to revenue share $20.5 million. But if we can revenue share as a department $2 million or $1.5 million, that starts to become a significant number. What we've done this past year, and none of our championship teams have had a penny of revenue share dollars or outside collective money. Some of our guys, they have equipment deals where they get 2,500 bucks, 5,000 bucks. Yes, they do. But it wasn't a conversation with mom and dad saying, we're going to get Warrior to give you $5,000. We've got it all set up for you. You're just going to have a meeting after our meeting with the Warrior guy, and then we're going to give you this five grand. None of that has happened.
What's ultimately happening at a place like Denver is, the way the scholarships works, you have tuition, you have room and board, you have books, you have fees. Then you have what's called Alston money, which is academic performance-based bonuses to the tune of $6,000 a year, if you get above a 3.0 throughout the year. Then cost of attendance, which is about $4,000. That $10,000 for each player, that's been what you're referencing as the equal payment to everybody.
What's going to change next year is that cost of attendance and that Alston money, those aren't going to exist anymore. They're just going to go into revenue sharing. Now, we have 25 players on our team, say all 25 of them got the $10,000. We'll have $250,000 pot to divvy up as revenue sharing, however we see fit.
Obviously, our goal is to grow that number when you're competing against the likes of Penn State, Michigan State, they're spending north of, I believe, seven figures on their rosters. That's really what we've been trying to build out the last couple of years, is our rep share numbers and our support plan around it, because we think that's a really sustainable way. It's a very clean way. It's a very upfront way to say to the families, there's no hoops to jump through.
There's no BS. This can be a rep share number. This is your room board number. This is your package, your tuition. This is what you're getting at Denver.
I will tell you, going forward, it will not be split equally as our revenue share numbers grow the pot. We will differentiate based upon on ice value. But I can tell you, we're not going to be in a situation where someone is making egregiously more than somebody else. We'll be very thoughtful and deliberate with how we do it, especially in year one, because you've seen money tear things apart in other sports, but certainly you're also seeing it in hockey a little bit as it relates to locker rooms.
Willy Walker:
You mentioned that it's a 501(c)(3), coach. I'm assuming that the payout to the players is taxable income?
Coach Carle:
That's a good question.
Willy Walker:
I'm just thinking about everything else that they get is non-taxable. The scholarship is non-taxable. Whatever room is non-taxable to them. Now all of a sudden, there's something there that I would assume is taxable, but I don't know the answer to that question.
Coach Carle:
I don't know the answer to that either.
Willy Walker:
Huh. Okay. Interesting. A couple more before we end up, we got about five minutes here. I've just got a couple of final things. You're at the coaches meeting from my quick search, about 40% of the coaches in Florida with you right now went to the university that they coach at. Is there an advantage to you and Coach Donato having gone to DU and gone to Harvard as it relates to kind of knowledge of the program and getting players to come? Or is that just not really in the, it might be at the margin, but it's really not a big, it's not a big advantage as far as having gone there and recruiting to the school.
Coach Carle:
I mean, I think it's like everything in life, it's what you make of it. Certainly, I'm going to lean into being an alumni of our school and our program and really try and make that an important factor within how we present ourselves and what we talk about the families. But it's really not to say that non-alumni can't lead their programs to championships. Jim Montgomery is the main alumni on a championship at Denver, George Gwozdecky.
Willy Walker:
Carvel from St. Lawrence and did it.
Coach Carle:
Exactly. I think you lean into whatever you can to be able to have success. Do I think if you do it properly, like any of these rules, like again, we have to play by the rules given? And then our job is to allow the rules to enhance what we do, not necessarily change what we do. That's kind of been our approach with all of these changes. Certainly, the big one that is likely to be coming in the next month or so with each base eligibility.
Willy Walker:
If someone watched you coach, who's listening to this and hasn't watched DU hockey games or watched you in the national championship behind the bench, you're an extremely calm and mild-mannered coach by my analysis of watching you coach. I've also seen lots of very active coaches, coaches who are kind of screaming throughout the game and telling players where to go. There's clearly some difference between hockey and basketball, where you see those coaches running up and down on the sidelines and they can actually speak to the players throughout the play. Whereas in hockey, you can't be sitting there screaming onto the sheet of ice all the time.
But is there something coach to your demeanor that is intentional rather than just your natural coaching style?
Coach Carle:
Well, people make those count, like yourself. I mean, you're watching me and our team on the biggest stages at the end of the year. What I would say is that our players will probably tell you I'm a lot more active and vocal in the first half of the year as we're learning, growing, teaching, and to me, by the time you're at that moment, you've done your work, and it's on the players to go out and execute.
They know what to do. We've prepped, we've shown, and had lots of meetings. That's where a lot of the communication certainly happens. And in those moments, you're just trying to manage it, stay calm for them, because I think everything's heightened. I think there's times where you can do more harm than good with your emotions, and in moments like that. Again, certainly there's, you got to pick your spots as to when that is.
But I think we've gotten a lot more out of kind of a calm confidence with our group than kind of the robustness that maybe you see from other people.
Again, it's leaning into your own strengths, your own abilities, and owning that because some guys are different and have success in their own way. As my coach at Shattuck used to tell me, there's a thousand ways to skin a cat, and you got to kind of figure out what works best for you.
Willy Walker:
Has there ever been a speech between periods where you either wanted to, I'm assuming there've been plenty of times where you want to go in and kind of like screaming out at the troops, cause they're just not playing that well. You said, no, I'm not going to do that today. Or you kind of gave the inverse, if you will, of the speech that one would expect at the given time.
Have you ever come in and said the way I did it last time was here. This time I got to kind of do a different signal to the team to try and shift things up? Or do you kind of just go back to the way that you say, this is the moment, this is the way I coached it last time. I had to do it the same way this time.
Coach Carle:
Again, I think you're trying to read your team and what they need out of you. I would say our groups probably, I don't know if they're surprised, but I'm pretty pragmatic. We'll lose games, and I don't go in and lose my marbles. Certainly, sometimes I do, that has happened on occasion. I think it's good that they see that at times, but they don't need to see it all the time. I think it starts to lose its value, or they tune things out, like, Oh, here he goes again. It's like, great. I just think it loses its impact.
Again, as we kind of coach and build throughout the year, it's all with the end in mind. You don't start something without really, and I hear people say just one day at a time, this and that, and like, don't think about the outcome. I'm a bit of the opposite. I think you need to be obsessed with the result and the outcome, and it drives what you do on a daily basis.
We start every year stating what our goal is, and it's to be the team that's playing its best in March and April. We have a chance to lift a really big trophy, and we don't really give a shit about any of the other trophies, or any individual awards or anything that people vote on. We care about the one singular thing that nobody gets to vote on. Anyway, so that really drives our messaging through moments of adversity and trying to grow and learn. It's not about making it about me and losing my mind on something. It's about what do we all need to collectively do together to look in the mirror as to how we can get more out of this and get more out of ourselves, which will get more out of the group.
Willy Walker:
It's very clear that that message has been well received by all the teams that you have coached. I'm super appreciative you've taken the time to talk to me about the way you coach and the success you've had with the DU team.
Thank you for taking the time from Florida. I'll be back in Denver tomorrow. You'll be back later this week, but I look forward to seeing you back in our hometown and really, really appreciate you taking the time, coach.
Coach Carle:
Awesome. Thanks, Willy. Thanks for having me on.
Really appreciate it and safe travels home.
Willy Walker:
Say hi to Carvel for me, if you would.
Coach Carle:
I will, for sure.
Willy Walker:
That's great.
