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Coaching Your Program

Program Prestige & Your Job Security

Two numbers hang over every season: your program's prestige and your own job security. They're related but not the same — prestige is the program's long-term standing, job security is whether you keep coaching it. Both move mostly on one question: did you meet the board's expectations?

Prestige Is the Program's Reputation, and It's Never Fixed

Prestige (1–100) is a rolling read on how strong your program is. It drives recruiting pull, sets the tone for donor confidence, and feeds directly into the win total the board expects from you next season. It moves every offseason, in either direction — a sustained run of good seasons lifts a mid-major into the sport's upper tier, and a sustained slide drags a blue-blood back down. Nothing is locked in at the start of your career.

A single bad season won't crater your prestige, and a single great one won't rocket you to the top. It's a slow-moving number that tracks a trend, not a one-year mood swing.

Since prestige is a trend, not a snapshot, your team profile shows it as one: a small arrow next to your Prestige, Legacy Score, and Rink Report Poll numbers marks how each has moved so far this season (or, for the poll, since last week), so you can see whether you're actually trending up or down rather than just reading a bare number. Your profile's Finances tab also surfaces Program Stature whenever it differs from your raw prestige — the better of your own prestige or your conference's exposure, which is what actually sets your facility, staff, and recruiting ceiling (see Finances). A program whose stature runs ahead of its prestige is punching above its record on the strength of its conference; keep winning and prestige will catch up to it.

Program Tiers — What "Blue-Blood" and "Mid-Major" Actually Mean

This guide talks about programs in loose, sportswriter shorthand — blue-blood, mid-major, rebuilding program — the same way real college hockey coverage does. Those terms all map onto one number: your prestige tier, visible on any team's profile:

PrestigeTier labelRoughly maps to
75–99Elite Program"Blue-blood"
50–74Strong ProgramUpper mid-major
25–49Middling ProgramMid-major / rebuilding
0–24Rebuilding ProgramRebuilding

A "blue-blood" in this guide just means an Elite Program — a 75+ prestige team with the recruiting pull, budget, and win expectations that come with it. Because prestige moves every season (above), these are labels for where a program sits right now, not a fixed cast of teams — a sustained rebuild can genuinely climb from Rebuilding Program to Elite Program over a long dynasty, and a blue-blood that stops winning can slide the other way. The league's fictional history (see Team & Conference Histories) casts a handful of programs as traditional powers, but nothing stops your own program from becoming the next one.

Program Buzz & Appeal — the Fast-Moving Read

Prestige is a slow-moving trend, but Buzz and Appeal, visible on your Program Summary, are the fast-moving read on how your program is doing right now — both can swing week to week where prestige really only moves once a season.

Both draw from the same pool of temporary storyline swings: a strong Narrative Event outcome, a deep postseason run, or accepting a Conference Realignment invitation all leave the same kind of short-lived bump (or dip) behind, on top of whatever your results are already doing. A genuinely notable swing also leaves a small, permanent mark on your Legacy Score — see Finances — so a season of good buzz is worth something real even after the spotlight itself fades.

The Board's Win Target Is Built From Your Own Prestige

Before the season starts, the board sets a win target derived directly from your program's current prestige, with a small adjustment for how strong your roster is relative to your usual tier. A blue-blood is expected to win a lot; a rebuilding mid-major is graded on a shorter curve. It's the same number the Coach page and Home board panel track all season, so what you're being judged on is never a mystery.

The three outcomes are straightforward:

A deep postseason run — winning your conference tournament, reaching The Final Freeze, losing the national championship game, or winning it — adds a further boost on top of whatever your regular-season record already earned. Losing the title game outranks a Frozen Four exit but still trails the championship itself, so how far you go keeps mattering all the way to the final horn. There's no downside version of this: a postseason run only ever helps.

The safety net: if you meet or beat your board target, your prestige and program legacy can't net fall that season, even if the postseason doesn't go your way. A team that wins the games it was supposed to win isn't punished for skipping a deep tournament run the board never expected in the first place.

The board's fuller in-season expectations — win total, reaching the tournament, winning the conference, producing a nationally-ranked scorer — are visible all year on your board-status panel, scaled to your program's stature. A blue-blood is expected to chase a conference title; a rebuilding program is graded on developing a single breakout scorer. One more entry sits on that same panel regardless of your program's stature: Signature Win, which simply tracks whether you've delivered a win in a Game of the Week selection this season. It's the one target on the board that can never turn into a red flag — it only ever reads "Pending" or "Met," since getting selected isn't something you control, only how you play once you are.

Job Security Is Judged Against That Same Bar

Every coach — yours and every AI coach in the league — carries a job security score (0–100, starting at 80 the day you're hired) that moves every offseason. It reacts to two things: how deep your postseason run went, and how your record compared to your own program's board target — the same bar prestige is judged against, so a blue-blood's coach is held to a tougher standard than a rebuilding program's.

These factors above apply to every coach in the league, AI included — an AI coach can end up on the hot seat and get fired by their own program's board exactly like you can. Three more things move the number, but only for you — AI coaches are judged purely on the on-ice factors above, not these: letting your NIL Collective finish the season in the red hurts you; recruiting your class efficiently — signing players near or under what the market demanded — helps, while badly overpaying across your class hurts; and winning the Voss Award (Coach of the Year) is a straightforward bonus. Your end-of-season board summary lists every factor that moved your own number by name.

Contracts, Counter-Offers & Getting Fired

You sign contracts in 3, 4, or 5-year terms. A multi-year deal buys protection — a coach on a bad run generally can't be dismissed mid-contract, only once the deal is expired or in its final year. If a higher-prestige program comes calling while you're under contract, your current school can counter with a real raise to your salary, a bigger NIL recruiting-budget ceiling, and a job-security bump to try to keep you — see Coach Attributes & Your Career for how your salary itself works.

If you opted into job security at career creation and you're dismissed, you aren't left without a job — a forced rehire screen lines up landing spots (programs roughly matching your coaching résumé, with a guaranteed fallback option so you always have a bench to stand behind) during the Coaching Carousel phase.

Every fired or retired AI coach enters a pool of available names rather than vanishing — waiting there for up to a few seasons before aging out for good. The same carousel that might fire you also recycles known coaches into new jobs around the league, matched roughly to their own market value so a strong fired coach waits for a strong opening rather than taking the first vacancy that appears, so a coach let go by a blue-blood tends to resurface at another quality program rather than a random mid-major, and vice versa. A strong program will occasionally poach a coach straight out of a lesser job, too — that's the price of success as an AI coach. Every AI coach also retires outright at 65 — your own coach is exempt and never ages out — and retirement does more to keep the carousel turning year over year than firings do.

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