Penn State men’s hockey head coach Guy Gadowsky said that his program has “explored” the possibility of taking on the United States’ National Team Development Program in exhibition action at some point in the near future.

The USNTDP includes the Americans’ national U-18 team, which is comprised of the nation’s best hockey players under the age of 18. The program also has U-17 and U-16 squads, and it’s a fertile ground for both college hockey players and future NHLers.

“We’ve explored [playing the U-18s],” Gadowsky said at his team’s media day on Tuesday. “There’s reasons for it and against it, and timing is really the biggest factor. I’m not saying it won’t happen again, but scheduling is sometimes difficult.”

Penn State has only played two contests against the U-18 national team since making the leap up to Division I ahead of the 2012-13 season. Gadowsky’s program lost to the Americans 5-2 before bouncing back to win 3-0 during a pair of games that were played on January 11 and 12 in 2013.

Typically, the USNTDP squares off against college-level teams in exhibition games 15-20 times per season. Last year, the U-18 team played 18 college opponents, including Big Ten sides Wisconsin and Michigan State.

In years past, playing the U-18s would give college teams a big recruiting advantage. Although Wisconsin secured the services of 2019 first-round picks and USNTDP alumni Alex Turcotte (No. 5 overall, Los Angeles Kings) and Cole Caufield (No. 15 overall, Montreal Canadiens) as part of its incoming freshman class this year, Gadowsky doesn’t necessarily think that playing the USNTDP would provide his program with an advantage.

“The pros are that [the U-18 players] get to see the facility and play on a team that we’d love to get more players from,” he said. “But now, everybody’s gone. A couple decades ago, you’d play the national team and hope that a lot of them would look around and like what they saw. Now, they’re all gone — long gone — so that’s part of it.”

Seventeen of the U-18s’ 20 players who dressed against Green Bay (USHL) on Saturday have already verbally committed to play college hockey. Among those is forward Daniyal Dzhaniyev — a 5’4″, 136-pound left wing from Brooklyn, New York — who’s currently a Penn State commit.

Evan Barratt — the Nittany Lions’ top center entering the 2019-20 season — spent his junior career with the development program before joining Penn State. He scored 80 points in 89 games for the U-18 team in his final season of junior hockey before joining the Nittany Lions in 2017-18.