How Many Hockey Teams Does it Take to Make a Conference?

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — By legacy, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association that current men’s league Commissioner Bill Robertson followed as a boy in St. Paul in the 1960s and ‘70s represented the hockey version of Big East basketball. Splashy and formidable, its five marquee programs — Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Denver — had 31 of the 38 national championships W.C.H.A. teams won between 1951 and 2011. No other conference, not even Hockey East, won more in that span.

But when Robertson, a former N.H.L. executive, assumed the commissioner’s job in 2014, the W.C.H.A. resembled the Big East in another way — a famous name fronting a diminished lineup. Eight schools, the marquees among them, departed in 2013 for the newly-formed Big Ten and National Collegiate Hockey Conferences. The ensuing musical chairs of conference realignment left the W.C.H.A. with a loose confederation of remnants and outliers, along with the widest geographic footprint of any Division I conference, stretching from Alaska to Alabama.

It seemed untenable from the start. And now Robertson is struggling to hold it together.

Last June, seven schools — Minnesota State, Bemidji State, Bowling Green, Ferris State, Northern Michigan, Michigan Tech and Lake Superior State — announced plans to withdraw from the W.C.H.A. and possibly form a new conference for the 2021-22 season. That left only Alaska-Anchorage, Alaska-Fairbanks and Alabama-Huntsville, the W.C.H.A.’s farthest-flung members. This week, the departing seven programs reorganized as the Central Collegiate Hockey Association, reviving the name of a conference that dissolved in the previous realignment.

“There is no script for this situation,” Robertson said recently at the W.C.H.A. offices, located in a bleak office park near the Mall of America. “It’s a challenge every day, and I’m trying to do the best job I can being professional, honest and focused on the job at hand — to get us ready for the playoffs, conference championships, and the N.C.A.A. playoffs. I can’t take my eye off that piece.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/sports/hockey/wcha-hockey.html