The Northeast-10 Conference (NE-10) is an intercollegiate athletic conference affiliated with the NCAA’s Division II. Member institutions are located in the northeastern United States in the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont.
Only Men's ice hockey is sponsored in the conference, which started for the 2003-04 season (standings for the 1999-00 to 2002-03 seasons were based off of ECAC records). The league members were all members of the ECAC Northeast and ECAC East through the 2008-09 season and had their own playoffs. As the conference is Division II (NCAA) they do not participate in the NCAA Division III Men's Hockey Championship. St. Anselm Hawks and St. Michael's Purple Knights played in NCAA Division III level New England Hockey Conference (formerly ECAC East) and were ineligible for their post season tournament or the national tournament as they play in Division II in all other sports. The members of the NEHC (St. Anselm and St. Michael's) also participated in the NE10 conference tournament at the end of the season while members of the New England Hockey Conference. The NEHC announced that it would be strictly a Division III league beginning with the 2017-18 season and as a result of that decision St. Anselm and St. Michael's were both out of the conference. They would become full members of the conference for men's ice hockey as on January 9, 2017 the conference announced that the conference was expanding its' regular season schedule to 18 games with the addition of the Post University Eagles to the conference as a scheduling partner to give each of the 6 full members of the league 18 regular season games (3 against each league opponent) at the Division II level, Post University will not participate the conference tournament. The release also stated that eligibility guidelines for junior hockey players was corrected by the NCAA to make it in line with D-I and D-III guidelines which were less strict than D-II. The team would be added to the as an associate member for 2019-20.[1]
Teams[]
Conference Members that play Men's hockey in other Conferences[]
Two members play in other conferences for men's ice hockey as these schools are Division I programs for men's ice hockey:
Former NCAA Hockey playing conference members[]
- New Haven Chargers (1968-1983) presently offer ACHA D-II level men's club program
Women's hockey schools[]
Three full conference members, as well as men's hockey affiliate Post, sponsor women's varsity ice hockey, a sport not sponsored by the NE-10. Another full NE-10 member will add the sport in 2021–22.
- Franklin Pierce Ravens
- Post Eagles
- Saint Anselm Hawks
- Saint Michael's Purple Knights
- Stonehill Skyhawks (begin play in the 2021–22 season)
Up until the 2016-17 season, the three non-Division I teams were members of what is now the New England Hockey Conference. That conference decided to go to a strictly Division III membership as the NCAA was not including games against non-Division III opponents in considering at-large bids to the NCAA tournament. Those three teams (plus Northeast-10 scheduling partner Post University) became part of a new scheduling alliance, eventually unveiled as the New England Women's Hockey Alliance (NEWHA), that created a six-team "conference" that started play in the 2017–18 season. The NEWHA initially included the Sacred Heart Pioneers, previously the only D-I women's independent, and the Holy Cross Crusaders, a Division I school that had played in the NEHC before that league expelled its D-I and D-II teams. The teams began by playing each other four times and holding a tournament to determine a champion.
Holy Cross spent only the 2017–18 season in the NEWHA, joining Hockey East; the men's program had been rumored to be a replacement for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish after that team left for the Big Ten men's hockey league. Shortly after Holy Cross departed, the remaining NEWHA members announced that they would officially organize as a conference, adopting all D-I governance rules; they also applied for NCAA recognition. In September 2018, the NEWHA announced that it would add the new women's team at LIU Brooklyn once it began play in 2019–20. Shortly after that announcement, Long Island University announced that effective in 2019–20, it would combine its two athletic programs—the LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds and the D-II LIU Post Pioneers—into a single D-I program that would later be unveiled as the LIU Sharks.
The NEWHA received official NCAA recognition upon LIU's arrival. The conference has since announced that NE-10 member Stonehill would add women's hockey and join the NEWHA in 2021.
Merrimack College was a former all-sport member of the conference but began transferring to the Division I level with the 2019-20 season. The college is a member of Hockey East for both men's and women's ice hockey with the men's team joining that conference in 1989 after playing in the ECAC East and the women's team in 2015 after starting as a club team for 2014-15..
League Seasons[]
The league started to sponsor its own playoffs in 2000 (while its members played in other conferences in the regular season. (For 2003-04 to 2008-09 seasons see ECAC Northeast and ECAC East pages for those seasons, as members played in those conferences and the NE-10 Conference held playoffs).
From 1999 until the NE-10 conference started sponsoring men's ice hockey for the 2004-05 season; the ECAC held a Division II playoff involving the D-II members of ECAC East and ECAC Northeast
The league schedule consisted of playing 1 time against each member season from 2003-04 to 2008-09- Since 2009-10 (when St. Anselm Hawks and St. Michael's Purple Knights stop playing regular season conference games) the four teams playing the regular season met each other 3 times for a total of 9 conference games for each team.
The conference schedule would be changed to an 18 game schedule for all teams beginning with the 2017-18 season.
- Note: For the 2016 conference tournament the Stonehill Skyhawks were declared champions by the conference as the highest remaining seed when final against the Saint Anselm Hawks has to be cancelled due to mumps outbreak on the Saint Anselm campus and the game could not be scheduled within a reasonable time frame due to the outbreak and exasperated by the fact that both schools were on spring break for nearly two more weeks.