As Neutral Zone prepares for the 2017-2018 season we sat down with Neutral Zone President and Founder Steve Wilk to talk about Neutral Zone, the upcoming season and exciting new features to the website.
What made you want to start Neutral Zone?
I played hockey as a youth both in the United States and Canada and fell in love with the game. When I had my son Stephen, I him signed up for youth hockey and followed his career with great interest like any other hockey dad. As he got older and his skills took him to higher levels, I realized there were some gaps in amateur hockey and it wasn’t just in our area. Players didn’t know where they stacked up on a national level. I felt it would be valuable to other scouts/coaches, as well as parents and fans to have a quality, neutral, unbiased scouting and rankings platform. I didn’t know how it would work or who we would be able to get to join us, but I knew that information was out there but not yet readily available. Now we have Neutral Zone to give players an idea of where they stack up against players their age from across the US/CAN and give NHL/NCAA/CHL/Junior scouts an unbiased, professional evaluations and rankings on amateur players. I love that we evaluate players who will star in the NHL as well as guys who will play at a small Division III school. They all matter to our staff.
What is your favorite thing about Neutral Zone?
For me it is how the site is being used. We have coaches and scouts who use the site to enhance their scouting and recruiting efforts, we have players and parents who use the site to see where they stand against other players their age across North America and read their evaluations from professional, unbiased scouts and we have fans who use it to learn more about players their team drafted or committed to. To do this the right way costs a lot of money; we have scouts all over North America every weekend on airplanes, in rental cars and staying in hotels. When you hear feedback from coaches, scouts, agents, players and parent subscribers about how our site helped them make more informed decisions its very gratifying.
What is your scouting process? How do you decide where to send scouts and how many times does a scout need to see a player to rate them?
Our scouting staff of 40 last year has grown to 60 this year between the men’s and women’s site. These scouts are located throughout the US and Canada and are responsible for covering the players within their geographic region. We also have a series of cross-over scouts as well as a Director of US Scouting (Brian Murphy) and Director of Canadian Scouting (Marlin Muylaert). Brian and Marlin are responsible for taking the grades from the regional scouts and putting it into a national context. Finally, we have a Director of Scouting (Brendan Collins) who oversees all of North America and takes those national grades and rankings and puts it into a North American context. So, every player on the site will at least be seen by a regional scout and every player with a star rating has been evaluated by a regional scout as well as a national or cross-over scout. If the player is nationally ranked, they have been seen by all three levels of our scouting staff.
Who are your scouts?
Quality scouting is the most important part of our site, so we pay our scouts and we only hire experienced professionals who have playing, coaching or scouting experience. They include Ian Moran, a 15 year NHLer; Sean Tallaire, a former 200-point NCAA DI First Team All-American at Lake Superior and NHL Draft Pick; Sean Collins, a former NCAA DI All-American at UNH and NHL Draft Pick; Paul O’Hagan, a Memorial Cup winning player with the Oshawa Generals and NHL Draft Pick; Brian Murphy, a 17 year NCAA Head Coach at Tufts University and their all-time wins leader; Marlin Muylaert a CIS National Championship winning Head Coach and NCAA Head Coach at Wisconsin Eau-Claire and Rob Ricci, a former NCAA D1 player at Merrimack and Minor Pro player. These are just a few of the guys on our staff and we also have a team of scouts who work with NHL, USHL, WHL, OHL and midget programs who ask to remain anonymous.
Neutral Zone has released that it is expanding scouting coverage in 2017-2018. How so?
We have made significant expansion not only to our scouting map but in our staff as well. Last year, we lightly covered junior hockey and focused most of our attention on U18, U16 and U14 hockey in the US and the OHL Draft aged prospects in Ontario. This year, we are going expand our CHL coverage to include the WHL and QMJHL draft prospects. We are also adding more scouts to watch junior hockey so that we can provide at least one scouting report every week in almost every junior league in the US/CAN. Lastly, we have added 3 goalie specific scouts who will complete monthly scouting reports, evaluations and ratings on goalies throughout US/CAN.
What improvements have you made from last year to this year?
We are constantly in pursuit of bringing our subscribers the very best product we can. We do analytics projects to see how our star ratings are converting to CHL/NCAA success and identify any areas we need to improve upon. We work with all levels of hockey professionals from NHL scouts to agents to junior organizations to CHL and NCAA coaches. We also attend the NCAA Coaches Convention every April in Naples, FL and get excellent feedback from the colleges on what they want to see. We get their feedback and make changes to improve the site. This year we hired a new web team that will make the site work better, especially on mobile devices. We’ll be adding an education section which will store a lot of data and analytics to help players and parents understand the world of hockey and make better decisions. We are also adding a chart that will track a player’s star rating over the course for their career as well as adding a monthly rankings platform. We have also been asked to do more free stories on either analytics, commitment or general hockey news, so we will be doing a lot more of that this season and introducing a free monthly newsletter. Lastly, we’ll be adding league pages on our site where coaches, players and parents can access rosters, schedules and statistics for free.
Neutral Zone is the only hockey scouting service in the world which offers both men’s and women’s scouting coverage. What was your thought behind adding women’s hockey?
We knew from the beginning that we were going to cover both boys’ and girls’ amateur hockey. We just didn’t know who was going to run the girls side. We hit a homerun with former NCAA All-American goaltender Jessica Cameron. In her first year, she has proven to be one of the most trusted names in women’s hockey and has built a staff of 12 respected scouts. They include former CIS Head Coach Tim Manastersky in Ontario as well as all-time leading goal scorer at St. Cloud University Roxy Stang and former NCAA coach Jacqueline Perez. We feel the same way about the women’s as we do about the men’s site; there needed to be a way for players to know where they stand and the hockey professionals needed an unbiased, neutral scouting platform by experienced professionals.
You mentioned Neutral Zone will be adding an education page to the website. What will that entail?
There are a lot of opinions in the hockey world and it varies dramatically from place to place. In New England players are taught that college hockey is the end all be all and the CHL is for poor students. In Ontario youth players are taught the OHL is the best path (and some would say the only) to the NHL and the NCAA is for players who aren’t serious about being a pro hockey player. We don’t want to add more opinions to these discussions, so we have spent much of the off-season on unbiased analytics to help answer questions coaches, scouts, players and parents have about all things hockey related. Does age matter for NCAA freshman? What junior leagues are the best producers of NCAA or NHL talent? Is there a correlation between where a player is drafted in the OHL and where they’ll be drafted in the NHL two years later? Are players who stay in high school or prep school until graduation worse off than players who leave early for junior hockey? We will attack these basic questions with raw, unbiased data to help answer these questions for our subscribers.
Who is the best player you have seen in your two years since founding Neutral Zone?
I am not a scout so that isn’t my department but I do go around the country and meet with our scouts and last year I was able to attend the Toronto Marlies Holiday Tournament and saw Jack Hughes. I wasn’t sure if they hype around him was legit, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen a 15-year-old do the things he was doing out there. He’s probably the best I’ve seen personally.
Is Neutral Zone hiring and if so where can applicants send their resumes?
We are always looking for talented people. I am a firm believer that if you have a passion for the game and a talent we can find a role. For example, we have Mark Bilotta loves hockey and has work experience in social media so he has taken over our twitter and Instagram accounts. We have Danny Kurchena as an intern the past two summers who attends RIT and played on the US Deaf Olympic team. He is a master at analytical hockey research and is the numbers guy behind a lot of our analytics projects. Right now, we are still looking to round out our final few scouting positions for the upcoming season and looking to bring in freelance writers to interview players and coaches and assist in our free monthly newsletter. If you are interested in joining our team contact our Director of Scouting Brendan Collins at bcollins@neutralzone.net
Photo Credit: Dan Hickling/Hickling Images
