College hockey was never built to stay in one place for an extended period of time, but the difficulty in finding stability over the past two decades was largely reinforced by two major sides of the same argument.
The unprecedented and positive expansion of teams exploded in recent years because of the unprecedented popularity of a growing sport in the United States, but it followed the occasional contraction of teams either left behind by their peers or by an expense report that couldn’t overcome individual barriers or hurdles.
ECAC Hockey bucked that instability by simply maintaining its heading. A conference viewed from the outside as a likely candidate for a split is instead in its second consecutive decade of continued, uninterrupted membership. No ripple effects from waters churning off the coastlines of every other conference ever touched the league, and it in turn celebrated a high-water mark last year when its four-team entry to the NCAA tournament equaled the Big Ten for most in the nation. Even in the league office, commissioner Steve Hagwell was seen as the perfect shepherd with his continued leadership.
Hagwell’s retirement in the offseason was the first timeline split in decades, but new commissioner Doug Christiansen is stepping into the role with a vision committed to building on the previous regime’s success. His implementation is only six months old, but the very core of ECAC remains unchanged as it begins its first steps into a future brimming with optimism and hope.
“I’m enjoying learning the challenges that come along with [the position],” Christiansen said. “By the same token, I think we’ve been able to make strides that build upon Steve Hagwell’s foundation. The institutions that we have, it’s a fantastic league, and it’s been great to see the parity. It’s also been fun to see the individual players and individual teams have some really great moments in the first half [of the year].”
Not everything is always rosy, but the league itself is staring at the future with a bright-eyed optimism that feels completely different from how things look to the outside. Only one team – league-leading Quinnipiac – is inside the bubble of the Pairwise Rankings as the first half comes to a close this week, but the Bobcats are the No. 1 overall seed in the mathematical algorithm and still represent the defending national champion crown with a nose pointed towards a possible repeat.
The women’s side, meanwhile, doesn’t necessarily match the top-ranked firepower of Ohio State, Minnesota or Wisconsin, but Clarkson received two first place votes in the most recent USCHO Division I Women’s Poll and still didn’t overtake No. 4 Colgate. The teams are a combined 32-2-3 to start the season while eighth-ranked Quinnipiac is 17-3 and ninth-ranked Cornell is 11-3-1. Two other teams – No. 10 St. Lawrence and No. 14 Yale – are well within the top-15 and are challenging for spots within the women’s Pairwise Rankings.
“I think the biggest piece about men’s hockey was how much the path to pro hockey has grown,” Christiansen said. “I was able to see it firsthand through the USHL, but even on the women’s side, the game has grown exponentially, evidenced by the fact that the [Professional Women’s Hockey League] is launching in about a month and a half. So, for me, coming back to college hockey, I’ve seen those things change, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the strength of the ECAC, which is the experience that the student-athletes have.
“We have great places for the people to live and be able to play and enjoy their on-campus life, and that part was really what drew me back. It allows me to have a clear focus on what we need to maintain, which is something that’s really important for the league. It’s been fun to come back and see how that’s [already] maintained, and then obviously there’s been incremental growth that’s happened and compounded over the past 20 years.”
The growth of the league’s internal structure, especially in the post-COVID era, is why there’s a parity that’s emerging in the aftermath of last year’s era of domination. Even as of this week, tenth place Harvard is one weekend’s worth of work away from second place Clarkson, and the bottom two teams are one point behind the Crimson with a two-game spread dividing them from fourth place and the last first round bye, while the women’s game had eight points separating first place Colgate from seventh-place Princeton, which is only four years removed from its most recent ECAC postseason tournament championship.
By this time last year, Quinnipiac and Harvard had all but sewn up the top two slots, and a full 10 points separated fourth from 10th place. The drop from fourth to fifth was five points from Cornell to Princeton, and the only drama at the end of the season came when the Tigers fell into a three-way tie for the final two home spots in the first round of the playoffs while Yale and Brown were at least four points back.
Signs of parity are an issue when the league only went 27-41-7 in the first half, but the large bulk of its .407 winning percentage is tempered between brutal losses to the three leagues with the most to gain from a marginal step backwards from last year’s push to near .500. Losses to Hockey East, the Big Ten, and NCHC essentially pushed a three-team bid back down to one with the limited spots, but the possibility exists of a second or third bid based on the second half of the year.
“I have a brother, and I can tell you that I never want to lose to him, but if he’s playing somebody else, I’m always rooting for him,” said Christiansen. “There’s an element of that, where we spend 12 months per year preparing to beat each other with recruiting and everything else that comes along [with the calendar]. But for that month of March and into April, you all coalesce and root on your teams.
“Quinnipiac winning a national championship is good for everybody. Clarkson winning national championships in women’s hockey is good for everybody. So we make sure that we do everything we can to support all of our teams in that tournament because we want to have a national championship to show for it.”
Christiansen’s first six months level set the league’s on-ice profile, but as the league moves forward, there’s an understanding that the infrastructure will, inevitably, change in a world where digital environments are faster and more necessary than ever to enlarging a league’s footprint. The added focus on individuals – the players and personalities that are part of winning teams – is part of the new landscape, and branding at every level is even more important when the conference is in a cast-iron skillet heated by the other leagues.
Everything is about availability, and with it, in the modern era, is an opportunity to open up even more revenue streams for a league that has 12 different avenues from which to apply pressure.
“The first thing is making sure the infrastructure is maintained,” Christiansen said. “And Steve did an outstanding job on that. That’s everything from the budget to the operational point of view with officials and all of those pieces. At the end of the day, that’s what you need to do. We, as a league, have really made sure that the foundation is built upon.
“The second thing is really taking a look at our branding and what it means to play in the ECAC for both the men and women,” he explained. “We’ve taken a significant amount of time and effort on that, and that’s something that’s tangible for people to see, whether it’s alumni or fans or prospective student-athletes or current student-athletes. We want them to be able to see our league in a different way and see it through their phones while understanding exactly what’s happening on campus throughout our league. And last, we want to really look at the budget and the championships of our league because those are areas where we, as a league, really want to grow.
“Being a student-athlete, you play for the end of the season, and we really want to deliver on that in every capacity from an experience point of view and a financial point of view.”
