ECAC women's ice hockey
| ECAC Hockey | |
|---|---|
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| Established | 1961 |
| Association | NCAA |
| Division | Division I |
| Members | 12 |
| Sports fielded | Ice Hockey (men's: 12 teams; women's: 12 teams) |
| Region | Northeastern United States |
| Former names | Eastern College Athletic Conference (1962–2004) ECAC Hockey League (2004–2007) |
| Headquarters | Albany, New York |
| Commissioner | Steve Hagwell |
| Website | www.ecachockey.com |
| Locations | |
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ECAC Hockey is one of the six conferences that compete in NCAA Division I ice hockey. The conference used to be affiliated with the Eastern College Athletic Conference, a consortium of over 300 colleges in the eastern United States. This relationship ended in 2004; however, the ECAC abbreviation was retained in the name of the hockey conference. ECAC Hockey is the only ice hockey conference with identical memberships in both its women's and men's divisions.
ECAC Hockey was founded in 1961 as a loose association of college hockey teams in the Northeast. In June 1983, concerns that the Ivy League schools were potentially leaving the conference and disagreements over schedule length versus academics caused Boston University, Boston College, Providence, Northeastern and New Hampshire to decide to leave the ECAC to form what would become Hockey East, which began play in the 1984–85 season. By that fall, Maine also departed the ECAC for the new conference. This left the ECAC with twelve teams (Army, Brown, Clarkson, Colgate, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, RPI, St. Lawrence, Vermont, and Yale). Army would stay in the conference until the end of the 1990–91 season, at which point they became independent (they now play in Atlantic Hockey) and were replaced by Union College. Vermont left the ECAC for Hockey East at the end of the 2004–05 season, and were replaced in the conference by Quinnipiac.
The ECAC began sponsoring an invitational women's tournament in 1985. ECAC teams began playing an informal regular season schedule in the 1988–89 season, with the conference officially sponsoring women's hockey beginning in the 1993–94 season. ECAC teams won two of the three pre-NCAA American Women's College Hockey Alliance national championships, New Hampshire winning in 1998 and Harvard in 1999.
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