page_title: College ice hockey
section_title: Division I
hierarchical_section_title: College ice hockey / NCAA / Men / Division I
context_page_description: College ice hockey is played principally in the United States and Canada, though leagues exist outside North America.
  In the United States, competitive "college hockey" refers to ice hockey played between colleges and universities within the governance structure established by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
  In Canada, the term "college hockey" refers to community college and small college ice hockey that currently consists of a varsity conference—the Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference -- and a club league—the British Columbia Intercollegiate Hockey League. "University hockey" is the term used for hockey primarily played at four-year institutions; that level of the sport is governed by U Sports.
context_section_description: NCAA Division I will have 61 ice hockey teams as of the 2020–21 season, an increase of one from 2019–20. Of these schools, 21 are Division II or III athletic programs that "play up" to Division I in hockey, and 16 of the full Division I members are in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Seven of the FBS schools compete in the Big Ten Conference; six are full conference members and the seventh is a single-sport member.
  The NCAA Division I Championship is a 16-team, single-elimination tournament, divided into four, 4-team regional tournaments. The winner of each regional advances to the Frozen Four to compete for the national championship. For many years, 5 teams earned automatic bids through winning conference tournament championships, while 11 earned at-large berths through a selection committee. With the addition of the Big Ten Hockey Conference for the 2013–14 season, the tournament now features 6 automatic qualifiers, and 10 at-large bids. The ranking system that is used to determine the at-large teams is known as the Pairwise Rankings, which uses a number of ranking factors to create a scoring system for all NCAA Division I teams.
  In 2019–20, 60 schools competed in Division I, with 59 of them organized into six conferences, plus one team (Arizona State) playing as an independent program with no conference affiliation. The conferences are:
  Atlantic Hockey Association
  Big Ten Conference
  ECAC Hockey
  Hockey East Association
  National Collegiate Hockey Conference
  Western Collegiate Hockey Association
  The WCHA is now likely to disband as a men's conference after the 2020–21 season. Seven of the 10 men's members announced in 2019 that they would leave after the 2020–21 season; these schools have since announced that they will revive the Central Collegiate Hockey Association, which had previously operated from 1971 to 2013. An eighth WCHA men's member, Alabama–Huntsville (UAH), had also filed papers to leave after the 2020–21 season, but shortly thereafter dropped the sport entirely due to fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a successful fundraising drive led by UAH hockey alumni resulted in the team being reinstated one week later.
  The Ivy League recognizes ice hockey champions for both sexes, but it does not sponsor the sport; it instead uses the results of regular-season ECAC Hockey matches involving two Ivy League schools to extrapolate an Ivy champion (all six Ivy League schools that sponsor varsity hockey do so for both men and women, and compete in the ECAC). The Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference sponsored D-I men's hockey, but dropped the sport in 2003.
  The most recent addition to D-I men's ice hockey is LIU, which added the sport in 2020–21. The school has yet to announce a conference affiliation, but is speculated to be making overtures to Atlantic Hockey.
  The next addition to D-I men's ice hockey will be St. Thomas (Minnesota), which will move from Division III in 2021–22, though the school has yet to announce a men's conference home. After the end of the 2020–21 school year, St. Thomas will be expelled from its longtime D-III home of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference due to perceptions by most other league members that it had grown too strong for the conference. The Summit League, a D-I all-sports league that does not sponsor hockey, soon issued the school an invitation, and worked with the school to obtain a waiver of an NCAA rule that would have otherwise prevented a direct move to D-I.
  The Hobey Baker Memorial Award honors the top player in men's Division I hockey. The Mike Richter Award honors the top goaltender in Division I.
caption: A map of all NCAA Division I men's hockey teams.
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