Over the past month, 57 different college hockey programs jumped on the ice for games scheduled on any given night. They competed against one another to gain non-conference wins towards an eventual national tournament berth while battling league comrades for the first points towards postseason tournament seeding. Highlights rang social media throughout morning-after breakdowns, and the bumps and bruises associated with team identities began permeating the influential sphere of college hockey’s so-called water cooler debates.
Throughout the entire process, the six Ivy League programs from ECAC’s 12-team membership remained dormant. Part of an understood process preventing them from playing the same number of games as the other college hockey teams, the teams at Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton and Yale couldn’t begin practicing until the start of October, their late start an annual exercise steeped in an old academia. While other arenas teemed with life, chants, music and cheer, the six Ancient Eight rivals worked in quiet and scrimmaged one another with the same storylines seemingly left behind by college hockey’s formal first weekend.
For many college hockey fans, mentioning the Ivy League schools raised an eyebrow or elevated a snicker. The scheduling rule that’s often viewed as draconian and outdated was nothing more than a laugh or two, and the teams voted into the Division I poll slipped and leaked votes as other programs gained wins. They were simply empty names, but to the players, coaches and supporters of the six teams now entering the college hockey mixer, what separates the Ivies from their other college hockey programs is what makes them great – right on down to a championship that few acknowledge and even fewer understand.
“It’s really about our peers, as far as the academic rigor and requirements,” said Harvard head coach Ted Donato, himself a recipient of Ivy League championships as a player and a coach for the Crimson. “We’re historical [institutions], so I think there’s a lot of pride in trying to do as well as you can do to win the Ivy League while doing as well as you can against your rivals.”
Donato won the Ivy League championship as a player in the 1980s while the Crimson tore their way to the 1989 national championship, but the 1990 championship occurred despite Harvard’s sixth place finish falling two points behind Cornell in the greater ECAC standings. One year later, a dethroning by Brown occurred when the Bears went 6-2-2 in Ivy play despite finishing their ECAC season in eighth place with a 9-11-2 conference record and a 9-15-3 overall mark.
Winning the trophy – or the wooden plaque, in the older days – was made all the more legitimate by the rivalries incurred throughout the six institutions. The advent of travel partners within the ECAC paired Brown with Harvard and Yale with Princeton while the northern New England and western New York teams kept Dartmouth with Vermont and Cornell with Colgate, to which Harvard now travels with Dartmouth and Brown with Yale after the Catamounts swapped their spot to Quinnipiac after dismounting for Hockey East.
They would routinely batter one another, and even last season’s championship race forced Dartmouth wrest the Ivy League title from Cornell during the last weekend of the regular season. No head-to-head tiebreakers could be used for the Big Green, who defeated the Big Red in each of their two games against one another, so beating Brown and Yale on the road required Dartmouth to win its way to its first title since 2005-2006 and its first outright championship since the 1979-1980 season.
Head coach Reid Cashman later led Dartmouth to Coaching Staff of the Year honors as part of the conference’s postseason awards, and CJ Foley – the previous year’s Rookie of the Year – earned Player of the Year status with Harvard freshman Mick Thompson winning the Rookie of the Year Award.
None, it should be noted, won those awards within the ECAC’s year-end ceremony,
“The program is headed for great things,” said Foley in The Dartmouth’s April 4, 2025 edition. “We took an Ivy League Championship, which was a special moment in this program, and we fell short of the ECAC title. That’s our next step.”
Striking the heart of the Ivy League’s intraconference rivalries is very much at the center of college hockey’s folklore at a time when modernity rules the conversation. The six schools are set apart by their brethren because of their history, and they are callbacks and throwbacks to the old Pentagonal League roots that grew out of the geometrically-named Quadragonal Hockey League and Triangular Hockey League. Their lineage is steeped in the remnants of World War I-era hockey, and since their reformation into the Ivy League, every program has found its way to the top – even Princeton, which failed to win the Ancient Eight championship until it shared the 1998-1999 championship with Yale.
That said, the characters who built the treasured stories of each program’s history book often stand in contrast to the blistering pace of the modern college hockey game now seeing new teams and arenas at nearly every turn. Video board presentations and light shows aren’t things of the past, and every year seemingly drives Ivy League teams further down the voted-on polls because their programs lack the angle-inducing wins from early October. A world that’s focused on technological advancement in and around the locker room increasingly imperils the curation of the past, so the more critical balance is about striking a medium between their tipping scales.
Fault lines still exist, and ECAC is increasingly careful to avoid the fractures that harbored the havoc of Hockey East’s creation in the 1980s. At the time, formalization of an Ivy League community seemed like a foregone conclusion compared to the East Region’s schools at Boston College or Boston University, so the eastern bloc of teams within the three-division league opted to instead breakaway and rebuild their future as Hockey East.
“A recent move by the Ivy League to form a league with its six members plus Army, Colgate, RPI and Vermont triggered the latest discussions,” wrote Bob Monahan in the Boston Globe’s July 13, 1983 edition. “The ECAC has been operating its hockey program with three divisions: Ivy – Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton and Yale; East – BC, BU, Maine, UNH, NU and Providence; West – Clarkson, Colgate, RPI, St. Lawrence and Vermont.”
That “real Ivy League” never formed, but the resulting ECAC forced itself to find ways to honor the Ivy tradition without compromising its 12-team core. As time bore forward, the robust membership based around a men’s game and a women’s league emerged, and the harmony between the two subsegments found a way to coexist – for now, at least – through its inherent and unique challenges. The league never changed while the Big Ten and NCHC formed in the west, nor did it alter its membership through the collapse of College Hockey America and Hockey East’s additions and contractions.
“Kids choose Cornell because of the quality of the education,” said former Big Red head coach Mike Schafer in a segment of an interview among Cornell alumni. “They’ll choose us athletically because we have a history of winning and because our alumni have succeeded in getting to the NHL.”
Penn and Columbia remained the lone outliers – the Quakers suspended their program in 1978 while the Lions never carried a team into the throes of the post-World War II era – and the six schools within the Ivy League soldiered forward – part of a bigger league providing access to the national tournament and the more recognizable championship trophies in ECAC while simultaneously continuing the Ancient Eight traditions of naming league titles and all-conference teams.
“[Our success] is pretty apparent right away,” noted Donato. “When you look around and see the history of the programs and the success of the programs, you see so many of the great players that go way back. You look at different achievements, whether it was an ECAC championship or an Ivy League championship or an NCAA championship or a Hobey Baker Award winner or an Olympian or an NHL award winner, and there is a great history within our programs.
“If you asked our players what their most exciting games of the year are,” he continued, “they’re against Cornell. They’re a big event and a great opportunity for us because they are great rivalry games, and whether they’re in any environment, when Cornell comes [up on the schedule], those are real high points for the season and for our programs.”