Selecting pre-2001 Women’s Hockey National Champions
By Ethan Fasking
Women's collegiate hockey predates the NCAA Women's Ice Hockey Tournament. It predates the WCHA and ECAC Women's Ice Hockey. It predates even the Eastern Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. In all that time, women's varsity hockey teams have been playing games, winning tournaments, and developing the game all while barely keeping their programs above water thanks to initiatives like Title IX. Even now, women's teams with decades of history struggle to secure even a fraction of the funding their male counterparts enjoy, let alone the respect. Despite a level of organized play similar (if not higher than) that of early men's hockey or gridiron football, the NCAA has refused to recognize any of these teams as the national champions of their given seasons, forcing them into the relative obscurity of "conference champions" at best. Here, I'll be going through every season since the Pembroke Pandas' inaugural season in 1963-4 and crown a national champion until the introduction of the NCAA tournament in 2001:
The Early Years (1964-1979):
The early years of women’s college hockey are mostly a series of fitful starts and stops across the American Northeast. 1963-4 saw the first season of a varsity women’s hockey program in the form of the Pembroke Panda’s (now the Brown Bears), who wouldn’t have a collegiate opponent until 1970-1 with the Cornell Big Red. As a result, many of these early championships are won by default or barely contested at all. It isn’t until UNH begins terrorizing the national circuit that we see definitive competition among powerhouses.
1964: It’s hard to say there are many “winners” to speak of in women’s collegiate hockey in its infancy. Pembroke’s first season was marred by severe underfunding and a lack of opponents, being stuck in scrimmages against the men’s teams and faculty in field hockey shinguards and wadded-up newspapers. That being said, the Pandas were the only varsity squad in America, and thus deserve the natty by default.
1965: Records are sketchy, but it seems the women of the Pembroke Pandas were able to find peers to play in the form of the Walpole Brooms, a community team based out of Massachusetts. So again, Brown gets the natty by default here, too.
1966: This is the last full season the Pandas get against the Brooms before the Brooms fold, another win by default.
1967-1971: Brown makes the trek up to Canada to play against Canadian university squads, even playing tournament games against Loyola, Queens, and McGill in 1969. Again, Brown takes the crown, making seven in total.
1972: By 1971-2, Cornell loaded up on coaching talent in the form of alumni John Hughes and John Duthie. The Johns laid the groundwork that led Cornell to become a powerhouse in this nascent era, but a 4-4 season (including 2 losses to Brown) would allow Brown to take their eighth national championship, the first in a competitive national landscape.
1973: Brown again sweeps a 4-4 Cornell (by a combined score of 8-2 across 2 games), taking their second competitive national championship.
1974: Providence introduces its varsity women’s hockey program. Cornell, the only school with a publicly available schedule for the season, beat a 3-5 Brown squad three times in as many meetings and never played Providence en route to a 6-4 record. Their four losses were at the hands of Canadian squads, and it’s a reasonable bet that Providence would have struggled as much if not more with those matchups. Given the limited information available, I have to award Cornell with its first title in 1974.
1975: The field is much closer in 1974-5, but the story is much the same. Brown goes 1-1 against Cornell (outscoring them 5-3 in those games). Despite outscoring Cornell, Brown went 6-3 compared to Cornell’s 12-2, meaning Cornell has the better claim to the title.
1976 and 1977: Cornell wins the Ivy League twice in a row, and thus earns the distinction of national champions both years.
1978: Dartmouth, Yale, and Harvard go varsity. UNH is granted varsity status and goes on to have an undefeated run that lasts 4 straight seasons, including handing Ivy League champion Cornell their second of two losses in the 1977-8 season. This would start a 6-year championship run.
1979: UNH’s second undefeated season sees them crowned national champions again.
EAIAW Years (1980-1983):
The EAIAW was the organizational body governing varsity women’s hockey from the 1979-80 season until they were subsumed by the ECAC in 1983. As such, they hosted the highest-level intercollegiate hockey tournaments during that period. I have treated the winner of the four EAIAW tournaments as the national champion of those seasons.
1980: New Hampshire goes undefeated again and wins the first EAIAW Tournament.
1981: New Hampshire remains undefeated for the fourth straight season, again capturing the EAIAW title.
1982: UNH again wins the EAIAW tournament to remain champions.
1983: New Hampshire caps off its dynasty with yet another EAIAW title and the distinction of national champions.
ECAC Years (1984-1999):
The ECAC subsumed the EAIAW in 1983, giving the new conference’s postseason tournament the same distinction that the EAIAW had had during their tenure.
1984 Providence def. New Hampshire
1985 Providence def. New Hampshire
1986 New Hampshire def. Northeastern
1987 New Hampshire def. Northeastern
1988 Northeastern def. Providence
1989 Northeastern def. Providence
1990 New Hampshire def. Providence
1991 New Hampshire def. Northeastern
1992 Providence def. New Hampshire
1993 Providence def. New Hampshire
1994 Providence def. Northeastern
1995 Providence def. New Hampshire
1996 New Hampshire def. Providence
1997 Northeastern def. New Hampshire
1998 Brown def. New Hampshire
1999 Harvard def. New Hampshire
The Year 2000:
The year 2000 was the last in women’s college hockey without an official NCAA postseason tournament. This means it is de facto disputed between the winners of the two premier conferences at the time: the ECAC and WCHA. Brown clinched the ECAC championship with a victory over Dartmouth, while Minnesota-Duluth took the regular- and post-season titles in the WCHA. In conference play, Brown went 19-2-3 while recording six wins and two losses in out-of-conference play. UMD went 21-1-2 and 4-4-1 respectively. Again, I don’t have complete schedule information for either team, so I am forced to make a judgment call based purely on the number of wins and losses. While UMD’s conference record is better, they went .500 against ECAC teams, where Brown beat WCHA teams in six of eight meetings. This indicates, to me at least, that Brown was the better team and deserve the title of 2000 Women’s Ice Hockey National Champions.
Totals:
So now that we’ve come to the end of this brief history of women’s hockey, let’s see who profits the most from counting these contested titles.
Brown picks up 12 additional titles, with the caveat that they were the only team competing for seven of them.
The Cornell Big Red gain four titles in the mid-1970s (1974, 1975, 1976, 1977).
The UNH Wildcats make like bandits, taking an impressive 11 titles, nine of which coming off of national post-season tournaments.
Providence College goes home with six national titles, all earned in the ECAC era, including a four-year dynasty from 1992 to 1995.
Northeastern takes three titles in the ECAC era, including back-to-back titles in 1988 and 1989 backstopped by Kelly Dyer.
Finally, Harvard comes away with the 1999 championship.
Final Thoughts:
So… where does that leave us? 30 more national championships divided up by 6 bluebloods? Is that it? In a way, yes. We took this journey into the history of women’s hockey, one filled with rabbit holes, forgotten records, and injustice on every level, and we came away with a half-dozen teams bringing home a couple plaques.
But there’s a there here, right? If you’ll allow me to be romantic here for a minute, this all means something. From the simple de facto titles of the ECAC era that you can find on Wikipedia, to the 2-0 sweeps that decide which of three total teams is best in the nation, they all matter. The women of the Pembroke Pandas, squeezing into donated youth gear and scrimmaging men’s clubs, who had no peers, let alone a title to aspire to, matter. They deserve recognition. Those Big Red teams who got by on excellent coaching and slightly better equipment matter. The 72-0-1 UNH behemoths who laid waste to everything those pioneers built matter.
The NCAA needs to give these women the respect they deserve. I’m not saying we need to give Brown seven new banners for natties they won by default. What I am saying is that these women, at the pinnacle of their sport, all deserve to be in the record books. They shouldn’t be hidden away in private archives or completely lost to time like many of their records. For many of them, it’s already too late for them to get that small courtesy. For the sake of those we can still honor while they’re among us, and the future generations of women’s collegiate hockey, we need to shine a light on the early history of the game, whether that’s by retroactive championships, or by releasing complete records to easily-accessible formats.
Special thanks to Gai Ingham Berlage, ECAC Hockey, Cornell Athletics, and Brown Athletics.
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