This past season reinforced the two different ways of looking at ECAC Hockey.
In a positive sense, its top team won the national championship as part of a four-bid postseason in the NCAA tournament, and ECAC matched a more heralded conference when it equaled the Big Ten with a quarter of the national tournament’s teams.
Cornell’s shutout win over Denver dethroned the defending national champion, and Quinnipiac’s run to its first title included wins over Ohio State, Michigan and Minnesota, the latter of which were considered star-crossed for a national final rematch.
Defanging the Big Ten produced the league’s third national championship and eradicated any lingering memories of the derisive comments referencing curses, voodoo, hexes or droughts wrought by Harvard’s 1989 championship, but the drama came at a negative cost to the conference’s bottom tier.
Three teams occupied slots among the 10 worst teams in the annual Pairwise Rankings. Three more were within shouting distance, and a whopping 16 spots separated Cornell from Colgate, the fourth team into the tournament and conference tournament champion.
Few seasons matched the success of watching ECAC’s men’s league ascend to hallowed ground, but few seasons equally complemented wins with the frustration experienced by onlookers who saw a 12-team conference place so many teams in the bottom tier. It was, in some ways, the capstone on retiring commissioner Steve Hagwell’s career, even as windows into future needs opened.
That type of duality has long been woven in the conference’s genetic code, and its announcement on Tuesday that Doug Christiansen would become its next shepherd signaled exactly how the league would commit to keeping things the same while changing for the better.
“I love the league,” Christiansen said during his virtual introductory press conference Tuesday. “I’m passionate about the league. I think it’s second to none in terms of the priority and opportunities that it provides for both men and women. You look at those [member] institutions, both academically and athletically, and they’re outstanding. I really enjoyed the opportunity that I had with the USHL. It’s a phenomenal league, and I learned a ton. And when this opportunity came up and presented itself, it was something that I pursued and wanted.”
The hire itself reads like a no-brainer decision for the ECAC’s member institutions. Christiansen played and graduated from Union during the Kevin Sneddon era, but his understanding of college hockey’s evolution extended to every phase and level embedded throughout the sport’s landscape.
His playing career involved years spent traveling throughout the ECHL before spending one season with the infamous Danbury Trashers in the independent United Hockey League, and after cycling through several AHL teams, Christiansen finished his domestic career by playing 99 career games with the Reading Royals. Three years later, he finished his career overseas with the Elite Ice Hockey League’s Edinburg Capitals and transitioned to coaching, and he eventually landed back on North American shores as the head coach of the Indy Fuel, experience he augmented when the USHL made the Wisconsin native its deputy commissioner last season.
“I thought I was going to be a lawyer,” he laughed, “but to me, the one constant in my life has been with hockey. It had been a part of every part of my life, dating back to being a young boy, all the way through high school and college. It’s been at every single spot along my journey.
“The other piece that’s been massive has been the education and the opportunities that I had away from home. I think this is consistent with that [idea]. It’s something that I look back at my time at Union, so I’m cautiously optimistic that I can try to help make sure that student-athletes who are there now or coming in the future have a similar experience to what I had, and then hopefully, they come back, whether that’s as a donor or a fan or somebody who just watches from afar. I want student-athletes to have that connection to all of our schools as well.”
Understanding those ideals are a reason why Christiansen can continue several of the league’s growth initiatives since he left the Capital District at the start of the century. ECAC spent the last 25 years on the cutting edge of the streaming revolution before it leveraged its Ivy League affiliates’ move from the Ivy League Digital Network to the burgeoning ESPN+ platform, and after moving its conference championship to Albany, N.Y., for eight years before three ill-fated seasons in Atlantic City, the Whitelaw Cup’s final rounds returned to Lake Placid in 2014.
Those successes helped the league mine its talent base, and the women’s league produced Olympic medalists opposite the Stanley Cup champions of the men’s league. The first league to ever boast a full complement of membership among both genders claimed the first NCAA Women’s Frozen Four championship for an eastern-based team, and in 2018, the first-ever all-eastern championship game featured Clarkson and Colgate after the Raiders beat second-ranked Wisconsin in double-overtime. Four of this past year’s 11 teams in the women’s tournament also called ECAC home.
“It’s hard to build on a national champion,” Christiansen explained. “Having four women’s teams and four men’s teams make the NCAA Tournament is a hard thing to build upon, but it’s obviously something we want to make sure we continue to work towards and to make that a consistent thing.
Yet there’s an understanding that things aren’t always rosy, and an era defined by realignment, the transfer portal, and the emerging business side of Name, Image, and Likeness puts ECAC in a precarious position. The conference carries more freight than its seven-team or eight-team counterparts, and while it’s nearly impossible to place all of those teams atop college hockey’s annual analytics, being able to further establish or reinforce foundations for both the men’s and women’s league is paramount for teams seeking to reach the next level.
“The coaches [in women’s hockey] have done a phenomenal job of attracting the elite, Canadian players,” Christiansen said, “but I think we can do an even better job of attracting some of the best American players. The highest concentration of women’s college hockey players is in the state of Minnesota, and unlike the East Coast, there aren’t an abundance of programs there.
“On the academic index, where the schools are, what the grade requirements are, hopefully that helps coaches get a foothold and attract women to the ECAC, and the opportunities that academically are available to both men and women is a great selling point. It won me over [as a recruit].”
That’s on the backdrop of a more free-wheeling sports world, and not even a national champion can quiet the rumor mill regarding expansion or break-ups. It doesn’t seem to matter to the hot stove that Hagwell embraced the 12-team model and solidified it during the radical realignment of the 2010s, and while Christiansen affirmed the league’s overall body by openly saying the league will stay at its dozen members, questions remain about how those members will operate in a world increasingly defined by dollars and the business terms.
“In terms of my vision, I think branding and recognition [can improve], whether it’s revenue or really trying to sell and celebrate the players and student-athletes,” Christiansen said. “The second piece is that this is an interesting time with [NIL]. You look at the member institutions of our school or in our conference, there are a lot of different types of schools. But there’s one common piece: they all have passionate fan bases. I think it’s going to be incumbent upon the league to help the coaches and administrators navigate that in this time.
“Because at the end of the day, you look at the schools and some of the endowments, some of the alumni, and it could be very, very impactful for both men and women in the coming years.”
Hagwell’s tenure created ECAC as it appears in the current era. It built a championship league and navigated churning, murky waters after the downturn of the 2000s signaled warning signs. He shepherded a league into which Christiansen arrived, and the players of his era transitioned the conference into an ultra-talented group capable of winning national titles.
The next step turns its attention to how that league converts its academic reputation into consistent capital during an equally muddy era. College hockey is entering arguably its most popular era, and the future is stronger than ever before. This hire, at least on paper and at first glance, more than completes that circle while starting it anew.
