When the Cambridge Matignon School announced it would shut its doors for good at the end of this school year, it left Boston Hockey Academy without a home.
Boston Hockey Academy, which had been affiliated with Matignon since the Tier 1 hockey academy's inception in 2020, found out when everyone else found out.
"We found out that Matignon was closing when the email went out that they were closed," said Nate Bostic (Worcester, Mass.), the president of Boston Hockey Academy.
Within the hour of viewing that email, Bostic and his staff got to work to find a partnership with another local school. They landed on the Academy of Notre Dame in Tyngsboro, Mass.
The Boston Hockey Academy staff was familiar with the Academy of Notre Dame. They had the school pinpointed as an option in a life-after-Matignon scenario. Bostic also had visited the school years before when he was the director of the Islanders Hockey Club and a potential partnership was explored.
"With Matignon closing, [the Academy of Notre Dame] actually reached straight out to me and we started working on the partnership," Bostic said.
It was a sudden change going from Matignon to the Academy of Notre Dame — there were players recruited for next season thinking they were going to be attending Matignon for class.
But families are pleased with the move. According to Bostic, nobody left Boston Hockey Academy because of the move.
"We feel and our families feel that it's an improvement in a lot of ways," Bostic said. "It's a bigger campus. There's more staff and educational support. In terms of our students, they're really excited about the change, especially the kids that are returning and were coming in and planning on being at Matignon — they're really excited. Everybody stayed so that's a great thing."
The Academy of Notre Dame features a 200-acre campus located roughly 15 minutes from Boston Hockey Academy's home at the Breakaway Ice Center in Tewksbury, Mass.
"We were really fortunate to get the partnership done quickly and feel that our families feel that it's an improvement from our previous situation," Bostic said.
Boston Hockey Academy currently has a 15U, 16U and 18U team. With the new arrangement, players will take their core classes up until lunch, spending 8 a.m. to roughly 1 p.m. at the school. Once core classes are done, Boston Hockey Academy busses players to the Breakaway Ice Center for three hours of training, which features on-ice work, off-ice work and video sessions.
On the tuition side, it will stay the same going from Matignon to the Academy of Notre Dame. The tuition is about $58,000, but Boston Hockey Academy says they use the FACTS management program.
"It gives us an idea of financial aid and scholarships," Bostic said. "We're starting to build out endowment so we can help families that need help financially to get their kids the opportunity to be in a program like ours."
Boston Hockey Academy is one of many different academies that have emerged in recent years, giving high school-aged hockey players another option.
"Academy hockey is growing," Bostic said. "We offer a brick-and-mortar experience when kids get to be in a classroom, go to prom, homecoming, pep rallies and participate in other sports activities. I think that's something that has been lacking for a long time. Obviously, hockey takes a lot of time away from being a kid because it's a tough sport. You have to train a lot and having the best of both worlds is something we really promote."
Because Boston Hockey Academy's season starts in October and wraps up in mid-March, students will be able to fit in a spring sport at the Academy of Notre Dame. A handful of the hockey players played baseball at Matignon this spring, while a larger number played lacrosse.
The hockey training gets flipped from the afternoon to night during the spring as well.
Boston Hockey Academy is only in its fourth year. Many other academies in the region have been around for similar lengths of time. They're all trying to find the right method to sustain success. Some academies have online schooling, while places like Boston Hockey Academy offer a more traditional school environment.
"I think it's different for everybody," Bostic said. "We had talks and meetings, especially after the closing of Matignon about the virtual academies and that was not an option for us. Our staff values education and more so just developing as a good human being and having to go to school every day and look your teachers in the eye and answer questions. Those are values that translate to post-hockey."
But the academies' biggest rivals are prep schools. The prep model has the benefit of history on its side.
"There's definitely a model for everybody," Bostic said. "We offer more hockey in an environment where you still get to have that brick-and-mortar experience of still going to a private school. Our sell is by Thanksgiving, when a lot of those traditional schools start, we've already had 50 practices and off-ice training sessions and video sessions and played 30 games.
"And then after the season when everybody's done in March, we continue until school is over in June doing skill development and off-ice training. They really get 10 months of training for the entire school year."
