NCAA Explainer 2026

The PWHL finally announced the preseason schedule! Hockey is back! Almost! PWHL teams are set to start training camps on Nov 18 with preseason exhibitions starting on the 22nd. So close yet so far as I sit here writing this in September. Have no fear though, the IIHF Women’s World Championship will tide us over until training camp! Women’s worlds will host the top 10 nation teams in the world from Nov 6th to Nov16th! Yes you are reading that correctly that some of these women will have a total of 2 days to get from Worlds in Denmark, to their respective training camps. November still seems so far though. There really hasn't been much hockey news other than weddings since the draft. I love love, but I love hockey too. Have no fear though. The student athletes of the NCAA are here to solve this plight. The NCAA Division I regular season starts on September 18th. Just a week away from when I'm writing this. Unless you care about Ivy League teams and then it starts in October but we will get into that. Let me give you the basics of what you’ll want to know if you’ve never followed DI hockey before.

The Overview

The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletic Association, an organizing body that oversees intercollegiate sports. There are different levels of the NCAA with Division I being the top and III being the lowest. For women’s hockey there is only DI and DIII. While there are DII schools, they don't have their own Hockey Championship to play in. This explainer will only be about DI. Now the NCAA governs all the colleges in DI however those schools don't all just play each other in a giant national league. That would be too easy for us to follow. Instead there are regional ‘conferences’ that are actually their own leagues with their own rules. Each league makes their own schedules. If schools want to play against teams outside of their own conference, the schools themselves have to set that up themselves. For women’s DI hockey there are 5 conferences:

• Hockey East
• Eastern College Athletic Conference(ECAC)
• Western Collegiate Hockey Association
• Atlantic Hockey America(AHA)
• New England Women’s Hockey Alliance(NEWHA)

These conferences are all different sizes and have different histories and rankings. They each play their own regular season and have their own conference’s championship tournaments afterwards.Wouldn't it be awesome if the best teams out of all those conferences played each other? Yes it would, and that's why they do that. Let me tell you why it's one of the most complicated things I’ve ever come to understand.

The National Championship

The NCAA D1 National Championship tournament is a similar format to the NCAA Basketball tournament more commonly referred to as March Madness. Once all the conference tournaments wrap up, any team who won their conference tournament will automatically make it into the national tournament, referred to as an automatic bid. So that's 5 out of 11 spots in the tournament. Yes. 11.

The remaining 6 spots are filled by what are called ‘at-large bids’. Essentially you just need to be nationally ranked the highest to get one of those bids. This is where it can get complicated. Remember when I said all the conferences are totally separate and make their own schedules and rules and whatnot? This means there's no standard number of games played even. These rankings feel pretty subjective to me, even though it’s technically done by a computer algorithm called NCAA Percentage Index (NPI). To normalize the rankings they base them off of two main things:

25% Win/Loss/Tie record

75% Strength of Schedule

Strength of schedule is complicated and that’s why a computer has to figure it out. Remember when I said to play outside their own conference the schools had to set it up themselves? Well this is why they do it. Playing against powerhouse teams in other conferences will increase your strength of schedule. That's one way to do it. Another consideration is that most of the games you will play are within your own conferences. But the conferences aren't all the same size. The WCHA is only 8 teams and the ECAC is 12 teams. If the ECAC teams play each other twice every season and the WCHA teams play each other twice every season that is not the same number of games. Remember when I mentioned the Ivy League schools not starting at the same time as the rest of the NCAA? Those schools make up half of the ECAC and they start a month later than the other half of their own conference which will also affect the schedule. The non Ivy ECAC schools basically have to load up on interconference games until October when the Ivy schools can start playing, so the non Ivy teams end up with 35ish games and the Ivys end up with about 29-30. All of that to say that at large bids are a wild system and on top of that a team at the top of the ranking may also win their conference tournament. If that happens they use the automatic bid and the at-large bid goes to the next team in the ranking. So eventually we get to 11 teams that way. Then they all play in a bracket of single elimination games. Once it is down to four teams it becomes the Frozen Four(similar to Final Four if you’re familiar) tournament that usually is its own location and event. Those 4 teams will play in single elimination games until there is a champion decided. The Frozen Four is scheduled to be in Duluth, Minnesota this year on March 21, 2027. It’s the culmination of the entire season and an absolute blast to watch the women compete.

So that’s the gist of how college hockey works. I’ll wrap this up with some storylines and background for each conference that might get you interested in following along.

WCHA

This is the powerhouse conference. University of Wisconsin and Ohio State University have won the National Championship 7 of the last 9 tournaments, with Wisconsin taking 5 and Ohio 2. If you’ve been following the PWHL and the 2026 draft that just happened, you’ll have seen a ton of Wisconsin and Ohio grads going in the first round. It actually puts Wisconsin in a bit of an unknown position as they’ve had those players for most of their recent championships. While they lost a ton of talent, they also picked up Nela Lopusanova. Lopusanova is a Slovakian player who has been considered a generational talent since she was like 12. She dominated U18 play and tied for most IIHF U18 points in history, a record initially set by Kendall Coyne-Schofield. She thrived the last few years at Bishop Kearney, which is basically a hockey superstar factory. This will be her freshman year and it'll be exciting to see how she performs at this elite NCAA level. There are two other names to know in this conference. The first is Joy Dunne of Ohio State. She played on the Olympic gold medal US team this year and she was only a junior in college. She’s currently projected to go first overall to the PWHL in 2027. The second name you need to know is Chloe Primerano, a Canadian defender at the University of Minnesota. She’s an almost point per game player as a defender and has really gone beast mode at some world U18 tournaments, even getting 16 points in 6 games one time. It’s her junior year and I think it’ll be a big one for Chloe.

AHA

Penn State has dominated this conference, winning the AHA tournament the last 4 years. They just had 7 players get drafted to the PWHL which is a huge amount of turnover for a 20 person team. They just made their biggest push ever last season, making it to the Frozen Four for the first time ever. They’ve brought in a haul of new recruits, including Kylie Amelkovich, an alternate captain of the U18 USA team that just won gold this year, and a Shattuck St. Mary’s graduate. She is also joined by her fellow team USA and Shattuck St.Mary’s goalie Morgan Stickney. Penn State will have to lean on the youngsters to overcome Mercyhurst and RIT making a push for that automatic bid this year.

ECAC

As a mid Atlantic east coaster, I'm pretty biased towards this conference. The Ivy league schools here have their strict rules but they are historical powerhouses in women's hockey. The Patty Kazmaier and Hobey Baker awards given to the standout player in women’s and men’s hockey respectively, are both named after Princeton athletes. This is a large conference with 12 teams and they're all pretty strong. Cornell lives and breathes Big Red hockey. They’ve been contenders at the ECAC championship in Lake Placid for years. If you look at a lot of the big names in Team USA history, they come from the ECAC. Julie Chu and Angela Ruggiero were at Harvard. Look at the 2026 PWHL Rookie of the Year, Haley Winn played at Clarkson. The thing I’m looking forward to this year in the ECAC is the incoming freshman at Princeton. Caroline Averill and Christina Scalese join the team as former team USA and Assabet Valley 19U teammates. Princeton also lost their top scorer in Issy Wunder but Mackenzie Alexander only scored 1 less point this past season. I'm looking forward to her having a big year to cap her collegiate career. Also coming off a big year is Kahlen Lamarche at Quinnipiac. She led the entire NCAA in goals scored last season and the Bobcats will hope for even more this season.

Hockey East

Northeastern and UConn were the top dogs of this conference last season. Stryker Zablocki as a freshman put up a wild 44 points in 39 games for Northeastern last season. While she led the team in scoring last year, the team captain Lily Shannon only had 1 point less, but has moved on to the PWHL this past draft. That loss might leave Northeastern looking to Zablocki to see if she has another level. UConn meanwhile had their National Goalie of the Year in Tia Chan move on to the PWHL as well. She played 37 of 39 games last season, meaning their backups have not had a lot of meaningful reps while Tia was between the pipes. They’ve brought on another Canadian goalie Amelia Wilkinson, who recently won gold with the U18 Canadian team in the 2025 IIHF U18 tournament.

NEWHA

This is a bit of an outlier conference, as their history as a conference only goes back to 2017. As mentioned earlier, there is no DII championship for DII schools to play in. NEWHA solved that problem by making an “alliance” between DII schools and DI schools to create a DI conference for them to play in. This conference is immediately at a disadvantage as far as strength of schedule. However they get an automatic bid just like every other conference, with Franklin Pierce, a DII school, winning this past season. They lost 4-0 in the first round of the national championship tournament but they had to overcome programs from DI schools to get there, which is a pretty impressive season. A fun storyline for Franklin Pierce this season is that they are getting an Olympian on the team. Anna Caumo had left them to play for Italy in the Olympics. She is now returning to them as a senior. In the preseason poll, Franklin Pierce was only voted to be 3rd in the conference so they’re no favorites to win the conference despite last season.