by – David McPherson
Cambridge, ON – With the playoffs in full swing across all five of the OHA’s leagues, what all these teams worked all year for is now down to these crucial games. For each of the franchises that hoist the championship trophy, there is a group of unsung heroes to thank, not often seen, but whose eyes and ears are integral to building a winner: the scouts.
For decades, spotting a scout in the stands at your local hockey arena was easy. They were the ones sitting stoically in a corner of the rink, their only companion an open notebook and a pen, furiously scribbling notes in short-hand while the rest of the crowd cheered and jeered.
The pre-requisite for this job was a passion for the game since watching hundreds of games a year and sitting in a cold arena far from home was the norm. Beyond that, the skills a scout required varied and there was never a clear-cut job description. “Just because you were a great hockey player does not necessarily mean you’ll make a great scout,” says Chris McCleary, the OHA’s general manager, operations, communications and marketing, who was the head scout for the Guelph Storm for a decade.
These eagle eyes are essential to hockey organizations at all levels. The higher ups rely on—and trust these valuable employees—to build rosters and determine future draft picks.
From an art to a science
Scouting in the earliest days was more of an art—albeit a subjective one—than a science; it relied on intuition, more than information. Just like a player’s path to the big leagues in 2026, there is no one way to scout in the twenty-first century. The talent pool is deeper than ever and so are the number of scouts.
What matters most now to these evaluators of skill, brawn, and intelligence—both on and off the ice—goes beyond what they see at a single game: the ability to sift through all of this talent and all of this data and find ways to compare players and rank them in multiple ways. That’s where software like RinkNet comes in. Jim Price launched this intuitive software in 1998 with the following philosophy, “We’ll do the work, so you can do the scouting.”
When the Guelph Storm hired Chris McCleary as a scout in the early 2000s, he was tracking players in Excel spreadsheets (which to the old-school scouts he worked with was already a step up from their pen, paper and binder system), but by 2005, when the team started using RinkNet, he, and his colleagues adapted, and immediately saw the benefits.
“It was a total game changer,” Chris says. “RinkNet included all of the schedules for every league and listed all of the active players in its database. If a player was not in their database, you could easily add them and build your own lists.”
More than 25 years on, RinkNet remains the go-to technology for scouts at all levels, and as its tagline says, it’s the “gold standard in hockey software,” currently used by 29 of 30 NHL teams, along with Hockey Canada, USA Hockey, the Canadian Hockey League, and many NCAA Division I and Division III schools.
Scouting online was once frowned upon. Now, it’s part of a team’s overall player evaluation strategy as a way to save money and to maximize resources. The rise of video makes it easier to see clips of a prospect online first and then determine whether to invest the time and money to go watch that player live.
Apps and AI Powering the Next Evolution
Like all industries, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is finding its way into the scouting profession. RinkNet offers PowerPlay AI, a secure team-specific tool to offer scouting snapshots. RinkNet CEO Jonathan Hou stresses, AI is just another piece of technology to help scouts organize data, summarize reports, and analyze their notes and evaluations. It’s not out to take their jobs away.
“AI doesn’t replace the scouts,” he says. “One of the things that people are scared about is they absolutely don’t want AI to write scouting reports for their staff. They want their scouts to keep writing reports because there’s a lot of value in that; AI does not replace that.”
Veteran scouts still love to use pen and paper to make notes and write reports at an arena, but more and more even these luddites are coming around and seeing the value of integrating these notes with their phones.
“Mobile apps are becoming more important,” Jonathan concludes. “Scouts are learning how to integrate the pen and paper approach with mobile apps and all the tools on their phones that they can leverage these days like voice dictation. Technology just brings all this data together, so that scouts spend less time finding the data and instead can focus on what they do best—looking for the best players that are out there for their teams.”
About the Ontario Hockey Association
The Ontario Hockey Association (OHA) was founded on November 27, 1890, and is the governing body for the majority of Junior and Senior hockey in the Province of Ontario. It is comprised of three Junior hockey leagues and two Senior hockey leagues: Junior A – Ontario Junior Hockey League; Junior B – Greater Ontario Hockey League; Junior C – Provincial Junior Hockey League, Senior –Allan Cup Hockey (AAA) and Ontario Elite Hockey League (AA). For the 2025-2026 season, these five leagues encompass 132 teams. 3100 players, and about 6,000 games each hockey season. The majority of our players are 16 to 21 years of age.
The objectives of the OHA are to foster and encourage the sport of amateur hockey, to conduct competition in the various categories established, to determine teams for entry into the inter-branch competitions that may be provided by Hockey Canada, and to provide for the affiliation of other hockey organizations.
The OHA provides administrative resources, coordinates programs, services and events for hockey participants and provides support to various Development Programs for coaches, officials, trainers and players, Safety and Risk Management Issues and offers resources for Harassment and Abuse education.
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For more information or to set up an interview, please contact:
Chris McCleary
General Manager
Ontario Hockey Association
