Seth Ambroz committed last Thursday to the Gophers men’s hockey team. He is only 15 and will be a high school sophomore this season.

So if he takes three years to graduate, he won’t wear the maroon and gold until the 2011-12 season. But wait — he is considering accelerating his education like three incoming ‘U’ recruits in this class. They all graduated from high school in three years.

“I possibly could accelerate,” he said.

He already has the size. He is 6-2, 195 and probably will grow a little more. His brother Matt is 6-4 and a sophomore on the hockey team at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. His sister Kacy will be a freshman on UMD’s national champion women’s hockey team.

“I might grow some more but I have not grown in a while,” Seth Ambroz said.

He played hockey for New Prague High School last season and had more than 50 points. Then he turned heads at the Select 15 Festival in St. Cloud in mid-August. He had eight goals and three assists to lead the tournament in scoring.

North Dakota and the U both made offers.

So why did he pick the Gophers? “I like the coaching staff,” Ambroz said. “It has always been a great programs, one of the topnotch. And I feel I will be able to develop there.”

Obviously, Ambroz doesn’t listen to Garth Snow, the Islanders GM.

This season he will play for the Omaha Lancers of the USHL.  That league has a lot of young high school age players, but usually they are seniors, sometimes juniors, not sophomores because the league also had 19- and 20-year-olds.

“I’m going down there to keep developing and get better,” Ambroz said. “I’m used to playing against older players. I’ve done it my whole life.”

Besides, Seth said he will be only about seven minutes away from his brother in Omaha.

Why did he commit so early? “Basically so I can focus on this season,” Ambroz said.

First-year New Prague coach Chris Lonke said he would have loved to coach Ambroz. “It would have been nice,” Lonke said. “I heard nothing but good things about him. But they left the door open, so good for him.”

Ironically Lonke, who coached at Hamline last season, knows a little about young phenoms already. He coached defenseman Jordan Schmaltz, 14, who last week committed to Wisconsin, in a national hockey festival.

“I know him, I had him in a 14-year-old camp,” Lonke said to himself upon reading the news.

“It’s always fun to do a USA Festival,” Lonke said, and later hearing about those kids. Now, the wait for news on them seems to be getting shorter, he said.

Schmaltz will be a freshman at Verona Area High School this season.

NCAA rules prohibit college hockey coaches from approaching recruits until the end of their sophomore year but players can approach coaches.

Schmaltz, according to a story in The Capital Times of Madison, said he accepted the Badgers’ offer because he likes the coaches — will they still be there in four years? — and the campus.

You have to wonder where this madness of offering younger and younger players scholarships will stop. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Gophers men's hockey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.