NCAA

Welcome to the 2018-19 NCAA Season Preview!

College hockey, yay!

It’s time to kick off the college hockey season!

For our seasoned fan, welcome back! Our weekly poll is back every Monday morning. New this year is our NCAA Fantasy League. You have until Thursday, Sept. 28 to put together your team. The league is just for fun, so the only thing you’ll win is bragging rights that you are inaugural winner of the TIG NCAA Fantasy League.

If you’re a new NCAA fan, hi! The NCAA is a great place to watch the current and future stars of women’s hockey, especially if you’re a fan of a professional or national team. The NCAA is a stepping stone to the CWHL and NWHL. You can also see numerous players from the last Olympics who returned to their college teams after taking last season off.

With 36 teams in four conferences, we know it can be a bit of a lot. So, we’re to help you get started.

We have a primer on the history of NCAA hockey. Read it especially if like trivia, and you impress all your friends with who the first NCAA Champion was. It also walks through how the Championship works.

Last season, Clarkson University won the National Championship for the second year in a row and their third championship (14, 17, 18). The Golden Knights are the only non-WCHA team to win it all.

Boston College’s freshman phenom Daryl Watts won the Patty Kazmaier Award winner for the best player in the nation. She was the first freshman to ever win. Remember how we said you can watch the future of women’s hockey every weekend in the NCAA? Watts is one of them.

There’s a lot of ways to follow NCAA women’s hockey. TIG has a Twitter list that has teams and coaches. We also have a weekly poll. A group of writers from TIG and beyond vote on the top 10 teams of the week. If you want to watch games, typically tickets are cheap, if you’re close to a team. Many conferences have streaming packages as well.

Hm, what else...

Here’s a table of the conferences and their teams. Holy Cross is joining Hockey East this year, making it the conference’s 10th team. Oh, sometimes you’ll see Hockey East abbreviated as WHE (the w standing for women’s Hockey East) because there is a men’s side of the conference as well.

Below we’ll update with links to preseason readings, including all of our 2018-19 preview content. We’ll have one preview per conference plus a few other posts to get you ready for the season.