As reporters and fans rhapsodized and lamented last week about the end of an era for the Big East men's basketball tournament, two of the oldest conferences in men's college hockey were going through similarly bittersweet celebrations of rivalries and relationships.
The 42-year-old Central Collegiate Hockey Association will award its last Mason Cup championship trophy this weekend in Detroit. Its 11 members wore patches this season that said Celebrate the Legacy, honoring a conference that produced eight national champions and scores of NHL players. Next season, all 11 teams will be in other conferences.
After the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, founded in 1951, concludes its tournament in St. Paul this week, eight of its 12 members will depart for new conference homes.
Whereas conference realignment in Division I football and basketball has been a continual tectonic shift, the changes in college hockey will come in one big bang next season, with the dismantling of two leagues and the creation of two others. It was set in motion in September 2010, when Terry Pegula, an oil and natural gas magnate, and his wife, Kim, donated $88 million to Penn State to establish a Division I hockey program.
Six months later, the Big Ten announced the formation of its own hockey conference, uniting Penn State with Minnesota and Wisconsin from the WCHA and with Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State from the CCHA. The Big Ten Hockey Conference's inaugural season next
fall will provide valuable programming for the Big Ten Network and even more valuable national television exposure for the sport.
In response to the Big Ten's move, the National Collegiate Hockey Conference arose from six members of the WCHA, including the seven-time national champions North Dakota and Denver, and the CCHA teams Miami (Ohio) and Western Michigan.
"It's sad to think about, but it's the reality of college athletics today," said Miami coach Rico Blasi, whose team is the top seed at the final CCHA tournament. "We owe the CCHA everything. It gave us the opportunity to grow as a program. But, like anything, as your son grows up, you've got to let him grow."
Gutted by defections, the CCHA and the WCHA had to scramble to survive. Only the WCHA did. By the time it added Alabama-Huntsville in January, however, the WCHA was the Big East of college hockey, geographically confusing and without its marquee programs. North Dakota, Denver, Wisconsin and Minnesota took 25 national titles and 16 runner-up finishes with them to new conferences.
With only 59 Division I teams, men's college hockey is used to long road trips and strange conference bedfellows, but the new 10-team WCHA is one of the oddest configurations to come out of realignment in any sport, stretching from Alaska to Alabama and back up to Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Although the conference brought together Alaska-Anchorage and Alaska-Fairbanks, their closest league opponent will be Bemidji State in northern Minnesota, about 3,000 miles away. Seven teams are more than 900 miles from Huntsville, Ala., home of the only Division I men's hockey program in the South.
"We kind of lost our soul in this thing, especially in the West," said Bruce McLeod, the WCHA commissioner for the past 19 years. "The problem for me was we internally didn't communicate well, as conferences and institutions. We weren't able to work the changes out in an above-the-table, sensible way."
Hockey East commissioner Joe Bertagna sympathized with McLeod.
"It's too bad the proud tradition and success of the WCHA has been broken up, through no fault of their own," he said. "I'm all for progress, but we should do it without forgetting who we are."
The reshuffling among conferences may not be done.
"I have this sense that things did happen in a hurry and people are going to reassess whether they're in the right place," Bertagna said. McLeod added, "From a common-sense standpoint, I could see some reconfiguring that would make more sense regarding competitive balance and geographic rivalries."
Though the sport will face an ending of sorts when conference tournaments wrap up this weekend, some optimism remains.
"This isn't the first time the college hockey landscape has changed," Wisconsin coach Mike Eaves said. "People would say, "The sky is falling,' but the sky didn't fall."
