Recruiting & Roster Building

Eligibility & Roster Rules

Roster Size

Your full listed roster can carry up to 38 players, but a competitive program settles in around 34 (roughly 20 forwards, 11 defensemen, 3 goalies). If your roster ever drops below 22, the game will quietly backfill it with walk-ons so you can always field full lines — you'll never be stuck short-handed. Not every roster spot is funded the same way, either — each player carries either a scholarship/revenue-share deal or a walk-on tag, and walk-on depth rarely sees the ice. You don't manage that split spot-by-spot; you're working from one combined budget (Revenue Share + NIL Collective) and choosing how to spread it across your roster.

The Players tab's Depth Chart card always shows how many healthy bodies you have at each position against the league minimum — tap Full Breakdown any time you want the bigger picture: a position-by-class-year grid so a gap like "no juniors on the blue line" jumps out before it becomes a problem.

Cutting a Player Costs Different Things at Different Times

Releasing someone from your roster isn't one uniform action — when and why you do it changes the cost:

The dedicated Roster Cuts step of the offseason (right before recruiting opens) is a genuinely penalty-free window for trimming dead weight — no prestige or legacy hit at all, on top of whatever buyout a guaranteed contract still costs.
Cutting a player any other time — mid-season, or outside that dedicated window — costs a little program prestige, even for a player nobody will miss.
Being forced to cut because you're over the 38-man roster cap at final roster lock costs more: a real hit to both prestige and Legacy Score, on top of any buyout. Staying under the cap on your own schedule is always cheaper than getting forced into it.

Eligibility: Four Years, Tied to Enrollment Age

Every player gets four seasons of eligibility, but how many of those four are still ahead of them depends on how old they were when they enrolled — a big deal in a sport that recruits heavily from junior leagues, where plenty of prospects are already 20 or 21. A prospect who enrolls at 18 or 19 has all four years ahead of them (a true freshman); one who enrolls at 21 effectively arrives as a junior with two years left. The prospect's card always shows their remaining eligibility, so you know exactly what you're signing.

A player graduates once their eligibility runs out — regardless of age. There's no separate "aging out"; a coach, by contrast, does retire at a fixed age, but players don't. See Program Prestige & Your Job Security for how a coach's career actually ends.

Medical hardship can restore a year of eligibility to a player who's missed most of a season to long-term injury. See Injuries & Discipline.

Redshirting: Trade a Season for Development

Redshirting sits a player out for an entire season without burning a year of their eligibility clock — the classic move for a high-ceiling freshman stuck behind a crowded depth chart. Not everyone is a candidate: goalies can never be redshirted, and a player needs at least three years of eligibility still ahead of him — a senior or near-senior has nothing left to gain from sitting a year out. The rules also allow exactly one redshirt per career, so it's a decision worth making deliberately, not reflexively. A transfer who already burned his redshirt at a previous school arrives with that option already gone — his profile shows it up front so you know before you sign him, not after.

The decision screen recommends candidates for you and recalculates live as you consider each player — because redshirting one player thins the depth chart in front of everyone else at his position, sitting one guy can weaken (or strengthen) the case for sitting another at the exact same time. The real trade-off is the same one you'd expect: a big gap between his current rating and his ceiling, and a genuinely crowded depth chart ahead of him, both push toward redshirting; a true freshman gets a little extra weight toward sitting, too. A redshirted player still develops (often faster than normal, since they're getting nothing but practice reps — see Player Development), but they're unavailable for every game that season, and sitting them costs real happiness — skill players who clearly want to play now (snipers and playmakers) resent it far more than a defensive-minded or two-way player who's comfortable developing quietly out of the lineup.

Draft Rights Aren't a Departure

Getting drafted by a pro team and leaving your program are two completely separate events. A drafted player's rights just sit with that pro team — he keeps playing college hockey, sometimes for several more seasons, until he actually signs a professional contract. The odds he signs (versus staying in school another year) climb with his age and his current skill level, but even a clear pro-level junior always has some chance of coming back for one more season. See The Pro Draft & Turning Pro.