According to Max Rider, the Madison Capitols coaching staff had no idea who he was when he signed up to attend their summer camp in 2024. The St. Louis Park native was an undrafted prospect in the USHL and he had been signing up for junior hockey camps that summer simply just to get more experience competing against top-level athletes and to get a few more games in over the offseason - he really wasn’t expecting anything big to come from it. He attended camp with the Waterloo Black Hawks and then had the Madison Capitols up next on his list. What happened next changed the course of his entire hockey trajectory.

Rider gave his best effort in camp and eventually sat down with the coaching staff at the end of the event to talk about his performance. To his surprise, he made the cut to attend training camp later on that summer. The coaches then wound up liking him so much that he eventually made it through all of the roster cuts that offseason and became an official member of the Madison Capitols in the fall of 2024.

It didn’t take long for Rider to agree to joining the Capitols squad, even though it meant forgoing his senior year of high school hockey in his hometown of St. Louis Park, located just west of Minneapolis. The 17-year-old felt at the time like this was an opportunity to develop his game that he couldn’t pass up and also that he would get an incredible amount of exposure from skating in the league. He knew that it’d be hard playing against guys that were some of the best in the world and also that he wouldn’t be playing every night, but he decided to rise to the occasion and accept the challenge of joining the USHL.

The forward from Minnesota knew that his role on the Capitols roster would be limited and that he would mostly be in and out of the lineup in Year 1 - but that didn’t matter. He knew that he’d be focused on listening and asking questions of both the coaches and of his teammates and learning as much as he possibly could.

Moving away from home to live in another state as someone who was still working on finishing up his high school classes online had its ups and downs, but Rider seemed to do adjust to his new city and his new surroundings incredibly well. He says that he tends to be a pretty independent person and that it wasn’t too hard to get used to that change, especially considering that he was the only billet player in the household he was living at in Year 1 and that the Capitols had scheduled ‘school hours’ for the younger guys to come in and get their assignments done in the mornings, which helped a lot to help balance school and hockey.

Even though the lifestyle change may not have been too hard for the Minnesota native, the level of competition in the USHL compared to the level of varsity high school hockey that he was used to was certainly quite different.

“It felt like I had been thrown to the wolves,” Rider joked to APX reporter Sydney Wolf. “I had zero junior games or practices (under his belt), so it was my first time, and showing up to training camp I felt way behind. It took me a month or two to fully catch up and to get up to speed because those guys were so good. I just had to ask questions and listen and practice. We have a lot of ice after practice that you can go use, so I was out there every day.”

Despite having ups and downs and being in and out of the lineup in 2024-25, Rider still amassed nine points through a total of 35 games played for the Capitols. The 6-foot forward took Year 1 as a learning experience and came back stronger than ever for Year 2 in 2025-26. Rider, who is now 18-years-old, is a top-line player for Madison this season and he’s got 22 points through 35 games played, so clearly he has figured out how to play in the league, and how to play well. In fact, he’s currently third in overall scoring on the roster.

“I knew I was coming back with a full year of experience and that I was going to be one of like only eight guys who were returning,” he said, particularly about the turnover on the Madison roster this past fall since many had left the USHL to join the ranks of college hockey. “I knew that I would have a leadership role as well since the new guys were going to look up to me - so I needed to go out there everyday and make good choices.”

Rider has certainly come a long way in his development over the past few seasons and his demand as a college hockey prospect has also gone up exponentially. Originally, Rider had a few schools talking to him while he was still at St. Louis Park High School, such as Princeton and St. Lawrence, but he didn’t start to receive more calls and recruiting interest until he officially made the roster in Madison in the late summer/early fall of 2024. He wasn’t necessarily receiving any big-time offers though until his game started to take off with the Capitols this past fall.

Western Michigan University was one of many programs that had reached out to Rider. The coaching staff originally made contact with him in the winter of 2024 and told him that they were keeping an eye on him and they even wound up coming out to a few games and talking to him over the phone a few times, but they weren’t in any rush to make a decision on him quite yet. Over the next few months, Rider was able to follow along a little bit with the run that Western Michigan went on to eventually win the 2025 Frozen Four and its first ever national title as a Division I college hockey program, which certainly was exciting to watch.

After a bit of time had passed, the Broncos officially decided to extend an offer to the Minnesota native and he announced his commitment to the university on Oct. 30, 2025.

“I am proud and humbled to announce my commitment to play Division I hockey at Western Michigan University. I would like to thank my family, friends, coaches, advisors, and everybody else who has helped me along the way,” Rider posted to his social media pages.

“They have a lot of stuff going for them right now. The run last year was definitely great for their program and they have a brand new rink getting built that’ll be done in a few years. Between the conference, the rink, the coaches … they know how to win, which is obviously the goal at the end of the day,” he said about his decision to commit to the Broncos.

Rider also said that it’ll be fun in the future because he already knows some of the other WMU recruits and some of the guys on the team right now too, such as his current Madison teammate Nolen Geerdes and his former Madison teammate Bobby Cowan - who is a freshman this season in Kalamazoo. He said that Cowan is a good buddy of his and that he was able to watch him go through the recruiting process with Western Michigan himself last season and heard lots of good things about the program through him.

The Broncos certainly aren’t afraid of recruiting Minnesotans as they now have quite a few on the current roster and even more slated to come in over the next few years. Rider is the only one from St. Louis Park though.

The 6-foot forward was born and raised in the Twin Cities metro area of St. Louis Park, located directly west of Minneapolis. He originally got into skating and hockey due to some family influence and also just from growing up in Minnesota and having tons of friends from school who played the sport. Max’s older brother, Miles, played hockey and was a big influence on him growing up and his father also played hockey a bit as well while growing up in Southern Minnesota (Rochester area). Max and Miles also have a younger brother, Finn, who is currently a sophomore on the varsity high school team this season in 2025-26.

Max’s first season up on varsity for the local Orioles varsity high school team was in 2022-23 when he was just a sophomore. It was a fun time for his family because that was the only year that he actually got to play alongside his older brother, who was a senior that season. Despite being just 15-years-old, Rider was able to post 23 points through 26 games, which was tied for fourth most on the overall roster and he had the second-highest number of goals (14), so he started to make a name for himself in the high school hockey scene early on in his career.

One of his favorite memories of his sophomore season was scoring not just his first goal, but his first two varsity goals, during the third game of the year for St. Louis Park in a 4-0 win over Hopkins, which also just so happened to be his team’s first win of the season in 2022-23.

“I definitely wasn’t thinking of myself as a pure goal-scorer, I just went out there to play and thought the points would come. My first year I wasn’t like blowing by guys and having silky goals, they were all pretty greasy,” he said about his playing style as a sophomore. “It definitely took some time for me (to adjust to the varsity level), guys were bigger, stronger and faster. I was probably in the middle of the pack size-wise but I had enough skill to make plays out there and I was fast. It took me time to just get used to the hits and stuff but I figured it out eventually.”

St. Louis Park posted a 12-13-1 overall record during Rider’s sophomore season, eventually losing in overtime to Holy Angels in the section 6AA quarterfinals.

“I think one of my favorite memories is from our section playoff game. I had the go-ahead goal in the third period and my dad loves to tell the story that the last goal of our season was Rider to Rider [a goal scored by Max, assisted by older brother Miles], and I think that’s pretty cool just because that was my brother’s last year of hockey,” he said.

Rider then proceeded to make a big jump in his development from Year 1 to Year 2 on varsity. He increased his offensive production by over double, scoring 47 points through 26 games as a junior in 2023-24 which was second-most in total points scored on the entire roster.

“I shot pucks every day, I lifted more - that’s the year that I started lifting - so I had some more meat on my bones. I could just compete more,” Rider said about some of the work that he did in the offseason to become a better player as a junior. “I just felt like I was definitely getting thrown around a little bit more my first year than my second. I had more speed too, and confidence, that’s the whole thing for me and everyone too I guess is just confidence and you gotta believe in yourself to be able to go and make plays.”

The Orioles went 14-12 overall and eventually lost again to Holy Angels in the section 6AA quarterfinals at the end of the year.

Rider then went on to attend USHL camps the summer after his junior season and wound up making the Madison Capitols roster, where he is at now.

In January of 2026, the Capitols are currently in sixth place of the extremely competitive Eastern Conference. In the New Year so far, the Capitols have only lost one game in regulation, otherwise they have two regulation wins, two overtime wins and a tie/shootout loss (at the time of this story being written).

“We had a little bit of a slow start but we’re definitely picking up now and we’re just a team that plays really hard and I’ve heard that we’re pretty hard to play against just because we play our systems well,” said Rider about the Madison team in 2025-26. “Our team’s getting closer and closer every day. We just got to work on playing as a team more.”

The Minnesota native himself currently has 22 points through 35 games, which is good for third-most on the overall roster in scoring. He self describes himself as a hard forward who takes pride in his shot and isn’t afraid to throw a couple of big hits a few times each game.

With Rider being only 18-years-old, it is currently up in the air on when he will join the Western Michigan roster. For now, he’ll keep competing with the Capitols, who are currently in the midst of a four-game series against the Chicago Steel.

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