The NCAA announced Thursday it has approved an immediate expansion of the women’s ice hockey championship bracket from eight teams to 11 teams. The expansion will take place for the 2022 tournament. The 2022 Frozen Four is being hosted at Penn State March 18-20, 2022.
Per the release: “The 2022 National Collegiate Women’s Ice Hockey Championship will feature the top five seeds in the tournament receiving a first-round bye. The fifth-seeded team will play at the campus site of one of the top four seeds. Three first-round games will be played at the campus sites of three of the top four seeds in the tournament.
The winners of the first-round games will have a day off before playing in the quarterfinals. The tournament will stay on its current schedule since no weekends will be added with this format.”
Expansion of the bracket was presented to the NCAA Championship Committee this summer and was initially tabled. After a gender equity report showed major disparities between men’s and women’s ice hockey, the committee reconsidered the petition for expansion. In early November, they decided to the women’s tournament should have 11 teams, but said the details of expansion would be forthcoming.
Today’s comments solidify that the larger field will go into place during the current season and begin to lay out the logisitics of what an 11 team tournament looks like. The wording of the tournament plan is noticeably vague about which teams will be playing where, leaving room for the “minimizing flights” travel rule to continue to impact the final bracket.
Women’s beach volleyball tournament bracket expansion was approved at the same time. Notably, the release mentions “the Women’s Beach Volleyball Committee will continue to review and discuss the best bracket format for 2023 and beyond.” No such notation is given about the women’s ice hockey bracket. Presumably, that means that this is the format of tournament women’s ice hockey will use for the foreseeable future.
In addition to the tournament ruling, today’s Competition Oversight Committee meeting codified that the NEWHA conference will begin receiving an auto-bid starting with the 2023 national championship.
