There may be an inordinate number of people from northeast Illinois with fingers crossed as they track the football season for Edina High School in suburban Minneapolis this fall. But those fingers won’t be crossed in hopes of success on the field.
In fact, despite holding no real animosity towards a school that they may have never even heard of until a few months ago, the Chicago-area crowd would probably prefer that the Hornets have an uneventful few months with a pedestrian offense reliant mainly on the running game. Just as long as the quarterback doesn’t get hurt.
And most importantly, doesn’t attract any big-time collegiate attention.
Edina’s signal-caller is Mason West, a 6-foot-6, 215-pound senior who is currently rated by 247 Sports as a three-star recruit and the 13th-best quarterback in the state of Minnesota. He also happens to be a dominant center who helped lead Edina to the Minnesota State High School League Class AA Boys Hockey Championship in 2024, and he was selected by the Chicago Blackhawks with the No. 29 overall pick in the 2025 NHL Draft.
“It was a dream come true and, yeah, I was the one getting drafted but it was more than that,” West said after the draft. “So many people helped get me here. My family, friends, and the whole Edina community has supported me a ton. I’m super blessed to be in this position.”
Blackhawks fans are just hoping that he remains in that position.
Mason West Could Open Collegiate Eyes With Success on the Football Field
While he has already committed to playing hockey at Michigan State University, West has piqued the interest of several college football teams as well, with offers received from a handful of smaller D-I football programs such as Marshall, Kent State, South Dakota and Miami of Ohio. But after throwing for 2592 yards and 37 touchdowns as junior, West has expressed his strong desire to be a state champion on the gridiron as well.
“Yes, for sure I wanna win. I have yet to win a football state championship and that was a goal of mine and having the opportunity to achieve that goal would be very special,” West said. “It would be another dream of mine especially because I have played with all these guys since I was super young. It would be super special to win something with these guys. It’s hard to say it would be over getting drafted but it would definitely be super cool.”
West and the Hornets got off to a good start in making those dreams a reality. In the team’s season opener on Aug. 28, West threw four touchdowns and Edina beat the Hopkins Royals 49-21.
“We were really pumped for the football season and energized for this game, so I think we just brought that intensity,” West said. “You can see from our first play, we scored right away. We stayed resilient when they scored some touchdowns; we didn’t panic.”
But a few more games like that could make the Blackhawks fan base start to panic, while making some of the more prominent D-I football programs start to take notice. On a recent episode of The Wrap Around podcast, Michael Augello of The Hockey News said he believes that, even though West has accepted the offer to play hockey at Michigan State, the potential lure of playing football at a similarly sized school could be too good to pass up.
“If he has an opportunity to go to a big school as a quarterback, I have a feeling that the Chicago Blackhawks are going to lose out on a guy who they drafted at the end of the first round,” Augello said.
‘Raw Tools’ Convinced Blackhawks That Drafting Mason West Was Worth the Risk
Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson knew that was a possibility when he traded the 34th and 62nd overall picks in 2025, as well as a fifth-round pick in 2027, to the Carolina Hurricanes for the 29th overall pick and the opportunity to select West. It was a risk that Davidson felt was worth taking.
“It’s just the tools — the raw tools are just something you don’t see that often,” Kyle Davidson said. “That size, that athleticism, that skating ability, that talent, the sky’s the limit.”
For now, the Chicago-area fans will just have to wait and hope that West, who will forgo his senior year of hockey at Edina to play for the Fargo Force of the USHL, doesn’t follow a similar path as Tom Glavine, a one-time draftee of the Los Angeles Kings who decided instead to pursue a baseball career that turned out rather well for him.
“It’s going to be a really interesting decision to see how this all plays out,” Adam Kierszenblat said on The Wrap Around. “But yeah, there’s definitely a massive uh risk-reward factor playing in here.”
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