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
- Hobey Baker Memorial Award — national Player of the Year, rewarding complete offensive production (goals, assists, plus/minus) on a winning team. There's a sportsmanship bar too: a player racking up serious penalty minutes is excluded from the race regardless of how good his statistical case is.
- Mike Richter Award — top goaltender, weighted heavily toward save percentage over raw win total — efficiency matters more here than backstopping a stacked team.
- Tim Taylor Award — top freshman, essentially the Hobey Baker race restricted to true first-year players only.
- Spencer Penrose 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.
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 contenders in every major race throughout the year, updating as the season plays out, and finalizes into the winners once the postseason is set. If one of your own players or your coach cracks the top of a race — or falls out of it — you'll hear about it.
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.
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