When Joe Bertagna stepped down after 23 years as Hockey East commissioner at the end of the 2019-20 season, he had no idea that he was setting a trend.

Two years after Bertagna’s departure, Josh Fenton left the NCHC after serving as that league’s only commissioner since its inception in 2013.

At the end of the 2022-23 season, Bob DeGregorio left Atlantic Hockey after 20 years and Steve Hagwell retired from the ECAC after 18 years.

Additionally, the men’s side of the WCHA folded in 2021 and Bill Robertson, who’d replaced longtime WCHA commissioner Bruce McLeod in 2014, left college hockey as well.

Including DeGregorio’s three years as Hockey East commissioner in the 1990s, that group had 80 collective years of college hockey conference leadership experience. Serving seven years, Robertson was the group’s newest member.

“You had, I’ll call it, the Mount Rushmore of the commissioners,” said Heather Weems, now in her second year as NCHC commissioner following Fenton’s departure. “They were there for a really long time – forever, if you look at the history with Steve Hagwell and Joe Bertagna and Bobby DeGregorio, these voices who had been at the table for a really long time.”

Weems and her colleagues respect the group of men who shaped D-I hockey for decades, who brought the game out of rinks and into the homes of fans with the rise of the internet, streaming services, and television deals.

“It was a solid group,” said Bertagna, now in his third season as commissioner of the Eastern Hockey League. He said that serving as commissioner of an NCAA hockey conference is a balancing act, with each league leader looking out for their own interests but realizing that hockey doesn’t “have a seat at the table in a lot of places” because most conferences are single-sport organizations.

“We had to get along,” he said.

That spirit of cooperation continues with this current group, whose longest-tenured member is Bertagna’s successor in Hockey East, Steve Metcalf. Former Minnesota coach Don Lucia became the newly reconstituted CCHA’s commissioner in 2020, a year before that league began to play. Weems came aboard in 2022, and the two newest commissioners are Michelle Morgan in Atlantic Hockey and Doug Christiansen in the ECAC. Morgan is also commissioner of the D-I women’s conference, College Hockey America.

Also part of this group – sort of – is Adam Augustine, who oversees hockey in his position as the senior director of sports administration for the Big Ten. The Big Ten itself hired a new commissioner to oversee all of its operations, Tony Petitti, who replaced Kevin Warren in May of this year.

Augustine’s roots in college hockey go back to his undergraduate days at Wisconsin in the early 2000s, when he volunteered with the men’s hockey team. After graduating, he became the media relations contact for the Wisconsin women’s team, and from 2008 to 2010, he served as the women’s video coordinator.

With the Big Ten, Augustine has been a strong advocate for college hockey. He sees timing of the turnover at the top of the D-I conferences as fortuitous.

“It’s not just the fact that there’s been so much change,” said Augustine. “It’s that the change continues to accelerate on top of that. Issues emerge and there are a lot of structural, systemic, existential-type issues that are out there for college athletics right now.

“To line that up with the moment where you have so many new voices in that commissioners’ room or across the country in influential positions, to me that’s all really exciting. I think we all have to approach this understanding that we don’t know what we don’t know, but so far I’ve been very impressed with the room. It’s a group that can meet these challenges, can work together, and take everything in a very positive step forward.”

The buzz in the proverbial room is palpable. There is a camaraderie that is evident in every conversation, a sense of cooperation and collegiality, and the kind of energy that sometimes accompanies the beginning of great new adventure. Everyone brings something unique to their position, and everyone else seems to be aware of how valuable that is.

Metcalf, the president of the Hockey Commissioners Association, worked for New Hampshire athletic department for 20 years, and he was deputy athletic director there just prior to moving to Hockey East. He chaired the NCAA Division I Men’s Ice Hockey Committee from 2018 to 2020, having served on that committee since 2015.

Metcalf said that he’s “increasingly aware” of his role as “elder stateman” among this group of commissioners. “I wasn’t planning to be.”

“As far as being the veteran of the group,” said Metcalf, “I guess when I entered into this position, I already was in a situation where I had really strong relationships with the commissioners because I just had come off being the chair of the NCAA committee. That was advantageous to me.”

Metcalf joked that being elected president of the commissioners association came about not only because of his previous experience, but because “maybe others just didn’t want to do it.”

“Then you fast-forward – and really fast-forward not too far – and Michelle comes in and Doug comes in, and I’ll be honest with you,” said Metcalf, “I talk to them all the time. Those two call me all the time.”

“He jokes a little bit because Doug and I are the two newest kids on the block and I’m only maybe two months ahead of Doug,” said Morgan, who was the senior director of athletics at John Carroll from 2018 to 2023. “He says, ‘I’m going to start charging you guys for all the questions you ask,’ and I say, ‘Well, I’ve already sent you a coffee gift card. What has Doug sent you?’”

“That’s the relationship among our group of commissioners,” said Metcalf. “Everyone leans on each other, seeks advice each other, best practices, share experiences and situations with each other.”

Morgan began her career in college athletic administration at St. Thomas, where she played hockey (2001-05).

“There are so many new things in recent years, with name, image and likeness, and social media, and things like that which really are opportunities,” said Morgan. “How do we become better masters of telling our stories and showcasing all of the tremendous things that are happening beyond what’s happening on the ice. What’s the human interest and the people side of it?”

Morgan calls single-sport conferences an “additional layer of challenge” because they are “a little more isolated” without the advantages of access to NCAA governance and policy-setting that multisport conferences – like the Big Ten – enjoy.

“That’s a challenge,” said Morgan, “but it’s also an opportunity.”

Christiansen, a Union College hockey alum (1998-2002), has a resume that encompasses many different vantage points in professional hockey, from playing to coaching, to administration. Immediately prior to taking the reins in the ECAC, Christiansen was deputy commissioner of the USHL for nearly a year. Christiansen also spent four years coaching in the USHL as well as four years as the league’s director of player development and recruitment.

“I think that college sports are obviously in a very interesting phase in terms of moving pieces, but I think that college hockey is extremely strong,” said Christiansen. “On the men’s side, we’re producing more NHL players than we ever have. On the women’s side, it is the premiere place for players to come and develop as people and as players. There’s no better example than if you look at the PWHL draft. Twenty-nine college players were drafted.”

Christiansen said that the job of commissioners is to “help amplify” the progress already happening on college campuses, as well as to build on the foundations of previous commissioners.

“Steve Hagwell did an outstanding job, but the things that were relevant at the beginning of Steve’s term versus the things that are relative at the beginning of my term have just fundamentally changed,” said Christiansen. “Social media, 15 years ago, wasn’t applicable to what we’re looking at now. Streaming wasn’t applicable to what we’re looking at now. How people are getting their information, how we grow our league, how we generate new revenue, how we attract new people to games in person is fundamentally different than it was 10, 15 years ago.”

Weems, who came to the NCHC front office after spending 10 years as Director of Athletics at member school St. Cloud State, said that organizational change brings new perspectives, and new perspectives can lead to new ideas.

“As the landscape changes in college athletics, having those different voices and trying to figure out how to maintain the visibility and voice of hockey is going to be really important to us,” said Weems.

“We’re one of the few and only really revenue-generating sports that isn’t part of a multisport conference, and I think at times we get lost because of it,” said Weems. “The only seat at that table is the Big Ten, in terms of governance structure, and so I think in the new age of the NCAA trying to figure out how everything works – what governance is going to look like, how championships work, and look at the de-bundling of television – we have to look at how we represent and grow hockey, maybe differently than what we’ve done in the past.”

Bertagna, who has also served as the executive director of the American Hockey Coaches Association since 1991, said that this new group benefits from its wide-ranging experience.

“Don Lucia and Doug Christensen have both played and coached hockey,” said Bertagna. “Michelle Morgan played hockey at St. Thomas. Heather Weems was on the rowing team at Iowa. Not that you have to have played or been in a locker room, but a lot of us feel that it does help. That was always the path to being an administrator for those of us who are older. We came up through the game. On the other hand, with some of the issues we are facing, a former athletic director will be really helpful.

“I do see the repeating of everybody having a role, and some of those roles are still being shaped and shifting around.”

That’s how Lucia sees it, too. Lucia has been involved with college hockey since his playing days at Notre Dame (1977-81). Right out of college, Lucia was hired as an assistant coach at Alaska – then Alaska-Fairbanks – and spent the next 36 years coaching hockey. He’s most remembered for the time he spent behind the Minnesota bench (2001-18), where he coached the Golden Gophers to consecutive national championships (2002, 2003).

All of that coaching experience was put to use immediately when Lucia came out of his brief retirement in 2020 to lead the reconstituted CCHA. He gets “volunteered” for discussions that involve officiating because of his years on the bench.

“I’m on all those calls with the officials supervisors,” said Lucia, who also attends the meeting that Big Ten officials have every January to review the first half of the season and prepare for the second.

“We have more dialogue with the NHL people,” said Lucia. “You go back 10 or 15 years ago, we had some head coaches – and I was included – with [NHL] general managers trying to make things better for college hockey. On our last call, Steve [Metcalf] says, ‘I don’t want to volunteer you, but you’re kind of a natural for that because you were on that before.’”

Lucia said that there are “a lot of changes going on” and that “change can be positive.” The changes extend to players, too. “Kids are different today from what they were. What are their interests? What’s their passion? You have to evolve.

“I get back to the passion that I have seen in the past from our commissioners, the passion for trying to make college hockey for everyone.”

Like Bertagna, Lucia sees the value – and the potential – intrinsic to this group of leaders.

“We all come from diverse backgrounds,” said Lucia. “The more we can cater this group of commissioners to our strengths, I think it’s better for college hockey in general.”

College hockey’s tides are changing.

The emergence of new programs and their alignment into new conferences are inserting new conversation pieces into the overall landscape, and the rising profiles of Arizona State and Augustana are two examples in a world that looks nothing like its historical decades. The transformation is sometimes hard to swallow, but the moving and grinding plates are part of how growth is shifting its overall profile.

No two moves are the same, but the base of the sport shares the same values on which it expects to move forward into a new era. The build is being done with a certain togetherness, but that’s why every move is well-calculated and not simply a case of team-into-league. With the Arizona State and Augustana moves in particular, the next natural question is about what happens next in college hockey now that unbalanced leagues are embracing their new structure.

“Competing with an odd number of teams, I think, was a sticking point at one point,” said NCHC commissioner Heather Weems. “But I think we’ve seen that it can work to have an odd number of teams. The good part for us is that we’re in a place where this is where we’re at. We’re absolutely comfortable, and we feel good about our pod system. We made a decision about how we’re going to do our playoff format, and all nine teams are going to play [in the postseason] during the first year. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t consider additional teams or having another expansion, but I don’t know that there’s an urgency that it has to be filled if we don’t think we would be as successful as with our [current] odd number.”

The days of leagues needing to add teams simply to keep membership afloat no longer exist, and schools can no longer simply start hockey programs with expectations of finding membership within any of the six conferences, which is why each situation carries its own set of case-by-case requirements.

It used to be, for example, that people popularly viewed Atlantic Hockey as an exit ramp for programs either rising or falling. New teams that didn’t want to sink immediate funding into their teams could find a home in the AHA, and orphaned teams left behind by their leagues automatically defaulted to the conference in the court of popular opinion. The league itself was formed with a “cost containment” structure that protected programs in the Northeast against the rising expenses associated with Division I hockey, but things have unquestionably changed for a conference that spent the last decade growing itself through internal mechanisms.

“It’s not very difficult for anybody looking at the composition of our teams and members to see that we have public and private schools, large and small schools, and geographic differences,” said new Atlantic Hockey commissioner Michelle Morgan. “We have faith-based institutions and service academies, and we’re probably the most diverse when you talk about categories or demographics for how a school might classify or identify themselves, but at the same point, we all come together with the common thread of hockey.”

It hasn’t always been strictly about funding, but the choice to invest in Atlantic Hockey programs exploded them into the national scene in recent years. The 2014 opening of the Gene Polisseni Center helped RIT move out of its humble roots at Ritter Arena, and Bentley and Sacred Heart later replaced their small, dank rinks with glittery, shiny arenas while investment strategies helped produce American International’s four-year dynasty. Mercyhurst, Holy Cross and Air Force all hosted the Ice Breaker Tournament, and Robert Morris overcame the untimely disbanding of a program to rejoin the league this year.

Those growth initiatives are in line with places like Augustana and Arizona State, both of which invested significant cash flow into their programs’ overall infrastructure, and while it doesn’t automatically guarantee Atlantic Hockey of an at-large bid in the tournament, it also doesn’t mean the league is now an automatic home for a new program.

“We have an opportunity for growth,” Morgan emphasized. “With six members on our women’s side and 12 on our men’s side, it would be great one day to consider a 12th member for a more balanced schedule and even number to round it out, and with six member institutions for our women’s league, there’s certainly an opportunity for growth to add a few more so that we’re a little more hefty and robust in terms of membership, but we’re not going to add anybody on either gender, in either league, for the sake of adding. It has to be right for a lot of different reasons.

“It’s mutually beneficial for the institution that’s going to become a member,” she said, “but also to our conference schools and the conference as a whole. And that really boils down to strategy. I think something that’s in my initial focus for my tenure is really writing up a game plan of what’s worked well and maybe what hasn’t worked so well, along with how we’re working smarter with the resources that we do have.”

None of this locks a door on membership in any league, but understanding how leagues are changing is a critical realization. The sport is expensive, and marriages of conveniences historically led to messy divorces. The proud traditions that were once part of the WCHA and CHA no longer exist because arranged relationships didn’t survive, and building success requires a concerted effort from everyone involved.

The biggest thing we wanted to see and what’s always been important for the league’s membership is that the program is committed to our tradition of excellence,” Weems emphasized. “Obviously, Arizona State had a great tradition in their club program, but you can’t change that they’re relatively new. But they’ve demonstrated success, and they’re here to play. They’re here to play a strong schedule and compete, so while some of our programs have a strong, long tradition, once we saw Arizona State’s commitment to next-level excellence, we knew they’d fit in with us. They have a brand, in some ways, that’s probably the most notable brand of any of our schools just because of their department’s strength [as a traditional power conference team].

“College hockey in general has really evolved,” Morgan noted, “and I’ve seen it change since I’ve been in college athletics over the last 12-plus years. That’s for all sports, not just hockey, but the world of sport and the proverbial arms race for providing the student-athlete experience, they’re challenges that institutions face. Athletic departments are not immune to enrollment-driven institutions or if budgets are getting tighter, and that’s forcing a hand at times for departments to make tough decisions about what sports they sponsor.”

It’s hard to imagine a world where college hockey doesn’t change, but it’s impossible to envision what comes next. Ideas won’t stop spitballing, and there are easy, low-hanging pieces of fruit available for the teams in Alaska or at Lindenwood, Stonehill and Long Island.

The women’s programs that started the New England Women’s Hockey Alliance have enough membership to start a men’s league if the six Northeast-10 Conference teams ever decided to play-up into Division I, and both Alaska schools survived economic question marks compounded by the loss of their conference affiliation. Constant growth exists with women’s hockey and at the Division III levels, and the ongoing hunger and appetite for the game is proving that the ship is too far sailed to return hockey to its lower locales.

How new teams would survive or support the sport while enriching talent is all part of the open dialogue, but there’s no surefire path fully charting the game’s course. Hockey will change, but the manner in which it changes is up to the people living its life and breathing its breath. Future success is dictated by the combination of past and present moves, and the collaborative drive is very much a piece of writing college hockey’s story over the next decade and beyond.

Realignment is on everyone’s mind in college sports these days.

Things are changing, and the majority of sports won’t resemble anything like their present state by this time next year. The ACC, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the SEC – they’re all going to be different, and the dominant news in the sports cycle isn’t going to stop until the geographical alignment, whatever it used to look like, is fully imploded within the ecosystem driving the biggest national sports.

Hockey fans are usually able to escape that crunch to a certain degree. The sport’s niche background built this nice, insulated cocoon, away from the garbled world’s overall headlines, and this season begins with its same six-conference structure. The geographic look and feel is very different from 10 years ago, but the relative charm associated with the game’s foundation is unbroken and unshaken compared to the conference butterfly effect raging in other areas.

That doesn’t stop realignment or expansion talk from constantly occurring, but the basic understanding of the general factors driving those wheels requires a certain analysis and thoughtfulness. Trends are emerging out of a necessity felt throughout the college hockey world, but their existence holds a thoughtfulness rooted within the institutional and league hierarchies.

The plates won’t stop shifting, but they also won’t simply settle until everyone understands how college hockey is handling its fluid situation. The times are changing, but the sport’s fluidity retains some of the greatest pieces of its culture because where it’s headed is still grounded in where it came from.

“The membership was open to the conversations over the course of the last year,” said NCHC commissioner Heather Weems. “So we started asking what it would look like, what they brought to the table and to get a sense of how the story played out of how they fit. We continued the conversation with our board of directors and presidents and with our athletics council, and we really felt like it was a good time. We wanted to ensure that [expansion] brought stability to our conference, and we wanted to be committed to growth and growing hockey and being at a place where we invested in markets.”

It was undoubtedly a great fit for both parties, and the NCHC’s offseason splash to welcome Arizona State greatly breached the divide between the traditional powerhouses and the new, emerging game that underwent a radical realignment during the 2010s. The Sun Devils had earned a national tournament berth as an independent, but the strength of the NCHC came largely from its history, much of which was built before its schools realigned into the new league.

The league itself was an instant splash, and the first season in 2013 coincided with a nine-year run of Frozen Four appearances. North Dakota, Denver, and Minnesota Duluth won four consecutive national championships, and the fifth title by Denver occurred five years after the Pioneers defeated the Bulldogs in an all-conference final.

This past year’s Frozen Four was the first time that the league missed the premier event, but adding Arizona State reinforced each of those pillars. That previously-mentioned hockey tradition, even without a trophy to its credit, instead gained one of the fastest-growing teams in the nation, and the heights once envisioned by head coach Greg Powers delighted onlookers who readily saw the connection between the league and a rising power with an NHL-caliber arena.

“Arizona State made the NCAA tournament back in 2019, and at that point, we had determined that as a conference – and I was at St. Cloud at the time – we were still relatively new at that point, and we needed to get our feet underneath us a little bit [before expanding],” said Weems. “That program checked a lot of boxes, but they didn’t have a facility and didn’t have a tradition, so we weren’t sure how it was going to play out. Since that time, it was always in the back of our head that there might come a time when things aligned, and over the past number of years, we’ve demonstrated that we’re solid and stable from a financial standpoint. Arizona State demonstrated, particularly with the opening of Mullett Arena last fall, that they were committed to hockey at a really high level.”

Arizona State opened the right door for the NCHC, and the league returned the favor by curing the Sun Devils’ long-term solution. The program itself is continuously growing, and the conference is gaining new traction in a location served by the majority of its constituents.

“Once you get further west, you know that the amount that our schools take on for travel is very different than schools in the Northeast,” Weems said. “The reality is that most of our schools in areas like Minnesota can find non-conference games that are close, but schools like Denver and Colorado College are flying no matter what. If you’re Omaha, you’re going to fly. What we were able to do was keep the same number of conference games [for next year] by doing a pod system, and we aren’t adding any additional flight for any of our institutions.

“The nice part about Arizona State is that they became one of the easiest places to fly into for every one of our markets since every primary airport has a direct flight to Phoenix,” she added, “and a lot of them have a pretty good alumni base in Phoenix with people who spend their winters in Arizona.”

Not all moves are alike, but the idea that a new program could fluidly slot into a league is the reason why new traditions are quick to fit into the older college hockey world. The upcoming season, for example, is the fourth straight year with a new team hitting the ice for the first time, but the way Augustana University approached its hockey program is in line with the regional, grassroots approach that built the older eras of the teams of its future, CCHA-based home.

This year marks the fourth consecutive season with a new Division I program, and the large bulk of the programs represent colleges that are significantly smaller than Arizona State, which itself hit the ice three years after Penn State kicked off this whole realignment conversation with the introduction of its program. Those were the first two new teams since Robert Morris University joined college hockey in 2004, and the new teams, including Augustana University, are more in line with a more regional, grassroots approach to the game.

“It will be incredibly rewarding [to hit the ice for the first game],” said Josh Morton, the director of athletics for the Sioux Falls, S.D.-based institution. “This started in April of 2021 for us, and as we built up the community support to announce it that subsequent October, it’s just been about hitting milestones along the way. Each one makes it more real. We had our first official practice, and seeing 27 guys on the ice for Augustana University was incredible. We welcomed the team to the first day of classes, and going back to the introduction of [head coach] Garrett Raboin and getting into the CCHA, it’s pretty awesome to be [within] a month away from dropping the puck.”

Augustana’s journey to college hockey echoed what happened 20 years ago when Robert Morris University built a winning tradition by capitalizing on opportunities. Even back then, the Colonials arrived in Division I amidst a realignment shift, and an open slot in College Hockey America logically led the team to effectively replace Findlay after the Oilers dropped their program altogether.

The CHA eventually crashed, but the move into Atlantic Hockey alongside Niagara helped the program earn its highest reward with its first conference championship and national tournament berth in 2014. Even after the quizzical disbanding of the program in the post-Covid aftermath, RMU’s presence and build – and this year’s re-debut as the league’s “new” team – offered a blueprint for other programs to follow.

“For us, college hockey is a differentiator,” said Morton, the director of athletics at Augustana University. “It’s so much deeper than our campus. It’s deeper than 27 guys on the ice playing hockey games. It’s about separating our university. We’re the first team in [South Dakota] to have a college hockey program competing at the Division I level, and it’s housed in Sioux Falls, which is a dynamic and growing community. It’s really a differentiator for us in higher education, which is a competitive marketplace.”

The Vikings are tied to a hockey-mad market, but their debut is both different and unique from the way Long Island, Stonehill, Lindenwood and St. Thomas built their respective programs. Of that group, Augustana is the only one that isn’t in a pro hockey state, but Sioux Falls is physically located close to the Minnesota-Iowa border, which puts it right smack in the middle of junior hockey’s United States Hockey League footprint. To that end, the Sioux Falls Stampede offers some existing infrastructure, but the ability to tie college hockey into a junior hockey market is a unique opportunity.

“Sioux Falls is growing significantly,” Morton said. “And we have a vibrant economy and progressive community. So to offer terrific high level entertainment was important to us as a great community partner, and then to build an on-campus arena was really meaningful to us. To see that come to fruition later this season is incredibly gratifying.”

Decision-makers at Augustana understood hockey through that background, and the CCHA’s internal familiarity with the market created another western border for a league that arose when its members wanted a more geographically-centralized conference. Like Arizona State in the NCHC, the short distance trip to Minnesota State and the abbreviated distances to Bemidji State and St. Thomas make South Dakota an impression, and the Vikings’ build made it easier for those teams – and the ones situated throughout the Upper Peninsula and beyond – accept a new program.

“It’s about value and what kind of value a school can add,” Morton admitted. “I’m really proud of our university because startups don’t always get into a league right away. It was a big deal for us, and I appreciate [CCHA commissioner] Don Lucia because our conversations were really positive from the start. They wanted Augustana in the CCHA, and the schools agreed. Whether it’s an odd or even number, there’s going to be an adjustment, and it was certainly a factor, but I think that our value to the league and being a part of the CCHA overlaid that growth.”

Both Arizona State and Augustana will compete this year as independents, but they will hit the ice with opportunities to play against their future competition. The Sun Devils, who open up on Oct. 6 with a game against in-state club rival Arizona, later play Miami, Denver, and Colorado College, while the Vikings play two games against every CCHA member this year. They will play each other in mid-January when Augustana travels to Arizona for two games at Mullet Arena.