Awards & Individual Honors
Beyond the team race, four national trophies and a full slate of conference honors are on the line every season.
The National Trophies
- Corcoran Memorial Award — national Player of the Year, rewarding complete offensive production (goals, assists, plus/minus) on a winning team, with a real games-played floor so a hot streak in a handful of games can't sneak into the race. There's a sportsmanship bar too: crossing roughly 40 penalty minutes on the season excludes a player from the race entirely, regardless of how good his statistical case is.
- Whitfield Award — top goaltender, judged on three things measured against the rest of the field's own range that season: save percentage carries the most weight, goals-against average close behind it, and total wins a distant third — efficiency matters far more here than backstopping a stacked team to a big win total. Only a team's #1 goalie (whoever you've slotted as starter) can win it — a backup can't sneak into the race no matter how good his numbers look over a smaller sample.
- Sanborn Award — top freshman, essentially the Corcoran race restricted to true first-year players, with an age cap on top so a 24-year-old CHL import technically in his first college season doesn't win a "rookie" award over an actual 18-year-old freshman, plus a real point-production floor so an otherwise pointless player can't ride a strong team's win percentage into the race.
- Voss Award — national Coach of the Year, rewarding whoever outperformed their own program's expectations by the widest margin, with extra credit for doing it as a lower seed or against long odds. See Program Prestige & Your Job Security for how this ties into the board's expectations.
Every conference also crowns its own Player of the Year and Coach of the Year, judged the same way as the national awards but within that conference's own field.
All-American and All-Conference Teams
Beyond the four named trophies, two more honors get handed out every season, and they're easy to confuse with each other because they sound similar — but they're judging completely different pools:
- All-American First/Second Team is national: the best players at each position across the entire country, full stop. Making an All-American team, even Second Team, is a bigger deal than winning most conferences' own Player of the Year — you beat out every conference's best, not just your own.
- All-Conference First/Second Team is scoped to your own conference's field only. A strong player on a middling national résumé can still be an easy All-Conference pick if their own conference is weaker top-to-bottom — it's a real honor, just a different, smaller pool than All-American.
Both live in the League tab's History section: All-Americans get their own tab (National scope only, since it's not a conference-level honor); All-Conference teams show up under a conference's own Awards tab alongside that conference's Player/Coach of the Year.
Forwards and goalies are picked the same way they're judged for the national trophies above — scoring production for forwards, efficiency numbers for goalies. Defensemen are judged differently: a defenseman's two-way ability and defensive impact carry real weight, so a shutdown defenseman can make First Team on the strength of his play in his own end even with a modest point total — offensive production still matters and can push a two-way defenseman up the list, it's just not the deciding factor the way it is for forwards. That's why a defenseman's award row also shows his plus/minus alongside goals-assists-points — it's a meaningful part of how he made the team, not just a bonus stat.
Watch the Race All Season
You don't have to wait for the season to end to see where things stand — a live leaderboard tracks the top five contenders in every major race (including every conference's own Player of the Year race, not just the national trophies), refreshing every few weeks once there's been enough of the season for it to mean something, and finalizes into the real winners once the conference tournaments wrap up. If one of your own players or your coach cracks a race's top five, takes over the #1 spot, or falls back out of it, you'll hear about it directly — and a new national front-runner anywhere in the country, not just on your own roster, is notable enough to make league news. A strong program can have several players moving across different races on the same refresh; when that happens you'll see one combined alert ("3 Awards Race Updates") instead of one per player — tap it to see each individual update in your inbox.
The #1 spot is a strong signal, not a lock. Across a long run of seasons, whoever's sitting atop a race's leaderboard mid-season goes on to actually win it a little more than half the time — real movement happens in the stretch run, so a race that looks decided in January isn't necessarily decided at all. What's far more reliable is the leaderboard as a whole: the eventual winner is almost always someone who was already sitting in the top five, so use the front-runner tag as your best early read on who's really in the conversation, not as a guarantee of who lifts the trophy in the end.
On the National Radar
A player who's currently featured in the mock draft, a national award race, or a marquee national statistical leaderboard (points for skaters; save percentage and goals-against average for goalies) gets a small radar-wave icon next to his name on your roster tables. It's purely informational — a quick way to spot who on your roster is drawing national attention right now without having to check the Mock Draft, Awards Race, and League Stats pages individually.
On his own profile, the same signal shows up in the status banner just under his name — if it's the only thing worth flagging about him that week it's front and center; if he's also dealing with something more urgent (an injury, a happiness problem), it's tucked behind the banner's "+N more" tab. Either way, tapping it jumps straight to his News tab, which leads with exactly why he's on the radar (which race, which projected pick, which stat and rank) plus a running history of every source he's made the list under across the season — even in weeks with no story written about him at all.
It's More Than a Trophy
An award win is archived permanently in league history, and winning Coach of the Year specifically carries a direct benefit to your own job security beyond whatever your team's record already earned you.
Fun Stats
League → Stats → History has a Fun Stats tab alongside the Record Book — a set of lighter, browsable leaderboards: which states and provinces are producing your league's talent, who's racked up the most transfers or injuries, the youngest and oldest players in the country right now, who's riding the hottest scoring or winning streak this season, which draft picks turned into steals or reaches, and which programs have built the deepest trophy case. Nothing here affects your program — it's there to give a long-running dynasty some texture and trivia worth checking in on.
See Also
- Program Prestige & Your Job Security — how Coach of the Year affects your own standing
- Rankings & the Postseason — the team-level race these individual honors run alongside
- Media & Narrative Events — a player's News tab, where the National Radar card lives