What happened to the 2009 Birth Year on Long Island?

Hockey development on Long Island has been on a steady upswing over the last 10-15 years. With a population of over 8 million people and lots of disposable income, the area has all the requirements for producing top-end talent. In fact, take the proximity of the NHL’s Rangers and Islanders, sprinkle in some strong local youth coaches, and it’s no wonder that players like Adam Fox, Shane Pinto, Matt Coronato, Sonny Milano, Jeremy Bracco and Charlie McAvoy all trace their roots back to L.I. 

Need further proof of this recent success? The consensus 1st overall pick in the upcoming 2025 NHL Draft, James Hagens, is a Long Island native, as are a number of other players recently ranked on the NHL Central Scouting Preliminary Players to Watch list. So with all these recent accomplishments, we started to ask ourselves, “what is going on with the 2009 birth year”?

Now before anyone gets offended, we’re not saying that there isn't any talent this year on Long Island. In fact a casual fan could watch one of the area’s 3 AAA U15 teams and conclude that it’s business as usual in the region. A deeper dive into the data suggests however that there might be something amiss with the depth and development of this birth year, and we’re starting to wonder what happened. 

Team Success 

While the Long Island Royals and P.A.L Islanders have driven much of the region’s younger development over the last few years (including the aforementioned James Hagens) the Long Island Gulls have enjoyed the area’s most recent team success. In fact looking back at the Gulls U15 rankings during the last few seasons, we see that the 2023-24 team finished in 5th place nationally, while the 2022-23 team finished the year with an equally impressive 7th place finish. Both teams won the NY District Championship to earn a spot at USA Hockey’s National Tournament, and last year’s team made it all the way to the National Championship Final. 

On paper this year’s Gulls U15 team might not look all that different than its predecessors. In fact the group is presently the top ranked U15 team in NY and sitting comfortably in 14th place in the most recent national rankings. Digging below the surface however we see some fundamentally different trends emerging with this year’s team. To begin with, this group isn’t showing the elite dominance that we saw from the program’s previous birth years. Last year’s Gulls U15 team finished with an average goal differential of +1.83 through 78 games. The year before, the team was at +2.31 by the end of the season. So far this year the team is only averaging a +0.89 differential, and recently lost a game to 2nd ranked Mount St. Charles, 10-0. (in the previous 2 seasons, the U15 team never lost a game by more than 5 goals, and that only happened once each season) 

Now it’s true that a national rankings drop and a lower goal differential doesn’t necessarily paint a whole picture, but watching a number of their games we also see that the majority of this team’s top-end talent is from outside of the area. While this is not entirely unique for the Gulls organization who routinely brings in high-end talent to supplement their program, the disparity between the team’s out-of-area and home-grown talent this year is significant. 

Elite Player Development 

Team success is obviously only one piece of the puzzle in analyzing regional development. For instance we know that midget hockey is rife with player movement, and Long Island is no exception. Over the years, top-end local talent from the region has moved on to play midget hockey in North Jersey, Connecticut and even Rhode Island, where Mount St. Charles served as the landing spot for Hagens and other top talent from the area. 

Given the drop off in this year’s Long Island teams, it makes sense then to go searching for that elite local talent on other rosters. While we see some local players scattered across out-of-area rosters, including one of our highly ranked defensemen, Christian Semetis, who left the Long Island Royals to enroll at Mount St. Charles, we still aren’t seeing the depth of elite talent that we have in previous seasons. In fact only about 20% of the players from New York that were selected to attend USA Hockey’s U15 Player Development Camp this summer came from Long Island. 

More Questions Than Answers 

While we have tried to highlight some of the trends in Long Island player development for the 2009 birth year, the reality is that the discussion likely yields more questions than answers. There are certainly a number of different factors that could have contributed to this situation including, the impact of Covid, shifting regional demographics and competition among local programs. Moreover this could just be a blip, an anomaly with one birth year that will self-correct in future seasons. Either way it’s something worth keeping an eye on, especially for those programs charged with developing the next crop of Long Island talent. 

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