That, however, was three decades ago, and since then, the business has evolved. The CHL had reason to fear losing top talents to NCAA hockey, and teams realized they had to sell players and parents on the league. Thus they offered to pick up the costs of the players’ schooling, at first while they played with the team and later with guarantees for tuition and books after their junior eligibility expired. But even in the new millennium, certain programs were very spotty with regard to the books. Just as the CHL recognized the image problems it had with discipline on the ice and addressed it with near-zero tolerance, levying heavy suspensions, the league has taken strong measures on the players’ education.

“We’ve mandated that every team has an academic adviser on staff,” CHL president David Branch says. “And the education packages have been expanded—they’re uniform now, and extend not just to university but to community college, trade school or training for EMS or firefighting school. And we’ve taken the administering of education packages out of the teams’ hands and now everything is done by the league—a player who moves from one team to another doesn’t have to go chasing after two different franchises for what’s fairly owed him.” It has also spared GMs and coaches from accusations, not always unfounded, that they might put their bottom lines ahead of a player’s best interests, that they might not push him to keep up his marks to avoid being on the hook later for his school costs.

The CHL initiatives seem to be having a significant effect in improving the lives of young players in the game and after their careers have run their courses. According to the commissioners of the respective leagues, 52 percent of WHL players and 49 percent of OHLers make use of the scholarship fund. In the WHL, fully 35 percent of active players are enrolled in post-secondary courses. The commitment to the players’ education is coming at a significant and escalating price: The OHL scholarship funds jumped from $1.64-million in 2012 to $2.9-million in 2016 and the WHL from $1.7-million in 2012 to $2.1-million last year. Those numbers loom large considering that approximately half the teams in the WHL and OHL don’t break even in a given season.

You think you know the CHL, but most of that is based on what you see on the ice, not what happens away from the rink and after the cheering stops. You might label the CHL as a development league intending the obvious—that it develops elite hockey talent. Still, it would be a sorry enterprise if that was all it developed. What follows here are voices of those who might have thought growth and development were over when the whistle blew on their junior days, but soon figured out that it was only the game that was at an end.