That change came when the NCAA amended its rules in November, 2024, to grant players with Canadian Hockey League eligibility to play college hockey.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At that time, Hurlbert was playing for the NTDP Under-17 team, where he had 37 points (19 goals, 18 assists) in 56 games, and had committed to attend the University of Michigan in 2026-27.<\/p>\n
“My commitment to Michigan, obviously, was prior to the rule change,” Hurlbert said. “So once it happened, it definitely opened a lot more doors for me and was just really happy about it.”<\/p>\n
Clouston said Hurlbert just needed to understand the opportunity that was waiting for him in Kamloops.<\/p>\n
“During the offseason this looked like a good spot,” he said. “There was a lot of evaluating our program, our roster, opportunity, those types of things. The vast majority of it was really the agency, and once we sort of answered all the questions I think that they had, and sort of built the level of trust there, it was all-in.”<\/p>\n
And Hurlbert was all-in from the drop of the puck, with a hat trick in his first game and 16 points (nine goals, seven assists) during a season-opening six-game point streak.<\/p>\n
He also was all-in off the ice, so much so that he was named an alternate captain.<\/p>\n
“During the summer each year we kind of establish the core of our leadership group and spend a little bit of time with them,” Clouston said. “When we went through training camp and exhibition games and kind of sit down with returning players, (we asked) who’s the next guy in the group who’s going to be a part of this? It’s not just you two or three guys. JP was a guy that everybody recognized right away that not only is he a good player, but he’s going to be able to help lead the team. It was unanimous with that group that he should wear a letter.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That change came when the NCAA amended its rules in November, 2024, to grant players with Canadian Hockey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":741942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-741941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/741942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}