chill bro, i did google and i didnt get any good answers. The eay canadian colleges are set up is confusing af . If i wasnt into skiing or hockey id think about canada maybe 3 times a year so you must realize how foreign of a concept this program is to an american. I still cant wrap my head around it .
Why are they doing this instead of Usports which is what the 30 year old ex jr players compete in??
Canadian universities (colleges generally refers to something else in Canada) are organized not that much differently than in the US when it comes to sports. There are 4 geographic conferences for athletics, from east to west, AUS, RSEQ, OUA, Canada West. Only one level, no DII, DIII, etc. There are college specific conferences that some universities participate in for specific sports if they can't/won't field varsity level teams.
Simon Fraser is different because their founder had big dreams about SFU competing in the NCAA as everything in the US looks more glamourous to Canadians. (SFU is not that old, it was founded in the 1960s.) The problem is they have never lived up to that vision. At one point the football program was rejected by the NCAA DII level and it moved to Canada West. But the first chance they got to leave, they jumped to NCAA DII which burned their bridges with Canada West/U Sports. So Canada West wants nothing to do with SFU now on the principle of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".
tl;dr: SFU sees itself as too grandiose and ambitious for the Canadian university sports stage, but nearly 50 years of fail has proven them wrong. If not outright delulu