RoughRiders forward Jackson Hendricks earns invite to USA Hockey camp

Cedar Rapids RoughRiders forward Jackson Hendricks earned a place in USA Hockey’s 2026 Hlinka Gretzky Cup Selection Camp, putting him in a 36-player field competing for one of the U.S. Under-18 roster spots this summer. The camp will run July 23-27 at TRIA Rink in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the final team will represent the United States at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup in Edmonton, Alberta, from Aug. 3-8.

The selection path matters as much as the invite itself. USA Hockey said the camp comes out of the Boys National 17 Festival, which means Hendricks moved through a national evaluation process before reaching this next stage. That places the Cedar Rapids winger in a high-pressure pool where short-term pace, detail and adaptability matter more than reputation or length of resume.

Hendricks is one of several USHL players on the camp roster, underscoring again how heavily the league feeds USA Hockey’s international pipeline. Isaac Davis of the Sioux Falls Stampede, Rylan Hanson of the Muskegon Lumberjacks, Jacob Lukes of the Chicago Steel and Jack O’Dell of the Dubuque Fighting Saints are among the other forwards invited, a list that shows the USHL remains a prime source of national-team talent.

For Cedar Rapids, the invite adds another development marker to a program that sells itself on getting players into meaningful USA Hockey conversations. These selections do more than reward one strong season; they signal that a player is being tracked against the country’s best NHL Draft-eligible-age talent and is considered capable of handling a condensed, best-on-best environment. In that sense, Hendricks’s camp invitation reflects on both his trajectory and the RoughRiders’ reputation for putting skaters into elite opportunities.

Elite Prospects lists Hendricks as a May 7, 2009-born forward from Wayzata, Minnesota, which helps frame the significance of the call. He is still early in his U18 track, yet he is already being measured in a national setting that feeds directly into junior, college and pro projection. If he survives the camp and makes the final 23-player U.S. Under-18 Men’s Select Team, he will join a tournament that USA Hockey describes as an eight-team event split into two groups of four, with preliminary-round games at Rogers Place and the Downtown Community Arena.

The U.S. is slated to meet Czechia, Finland and Germany in Group B play, another reminder that the invite is not ceremonial. It is a real opening to international hockey, and for Hendricks it places his summer squarely on the path where USA Hockey has long identified its next wave of high-end talent.