Moorhead native and current US Under-18 defenseman Sam Laurila will play his college hockey at the University of North Dakota he announced via his Instagram on Wednesday.
Laurila is one of just two players from Minnesota that made the jump from bantam hockey to the NTDP as he played (and won a Minnesota Bantam AA State Championship) with Moorhead bantams in 2021-22 and then made the NTDP U-17 squad last season.
North Dakota gets a steady and smart workhorse on the blueline that competes hard and doesn’t take shifts off. In bantams, Sam was on a different level that his peers, and when the time came to transition to juniors, he took it in stride and played with composure, not letting the much older players change or rattle his game.
Laurila is the second Minnesotan to commit to North Dakota in August as Ashton Schultz of Minnetonka committed to the school earlier this month.