Le Moyne held an on-campus event on Thursday celebrating its choice to move up to Division I.
www.syracuse.com
- Le Moynes moving all sports to DI and AD wants to bring hockey to the school. The current AD was an executive chair at Atlantic Hockey.
- Keene State is making a DIII men's and women's hockey team.
- Simon Fraser still trying to make a DI NCAA program. They are playing seven DI teams this year including Michigan, BU, BC, CC, Robert Morris, Lake Superior, and LIU.
Maryville University announced that it will add a competitive men's club ice hockey team for the 2018-19 academic year. St. Louis native John Hogan has been named
maryvillesaints.com
- Maryville would consider a DI move if the club is successful enough.
We're at the traditional halfway point of the season, so it's time to reflect on what's been (even though it's not really halfway yet for a lot of teams). It used to be that many teams...
www.collegehockeynews.com
- Missouri-Kansas City is looking to also consider DI hockey, which would be interesting for a future Summit Conference.
- UPenn trying to resurrect its DI programme by 2025 with endowment money used to upgrade its hockey arena. Supposedly the plan was to be ACHA DI by 2020, which never happened.
With the exception of Le Moyne; more on that in a moment. This whole post is quite a reach, and nothing truly current in terms of college hockey expansion news.
A paywall for the article from the Syracuse newspaper regarding Le Moyne prevents me from reading more than the first paragraph. But I'm going to say hockey is not in the cards for the Dolphins now or in the near future. Sure the AD has some background with Atlantic Hockey, the NCAA hockey rules committee, etc. and while college hockey people being in other administrative roles is good to see. I'm going to defer to their announcement that doesn't contain any mention of strategic plans to add anything to their current sports offerings with the move
LE MOYNE COLLEGE MAKES MOVE TO DIVISION I: ACCEPTS INVITATION TO JOIN NORTHEAST CONFERENCE - Le Moyne College Athletics
Simon Fraser's games against the NCAA teams are now more of a result of the new rules allowing NCAA teams to play exhibition games that came out of Covid. On that subject it's why more ACHA programs are playing exhibition games against NCAA opponents. SFU had been looking into adding hockey as a NCAA D1 sport, but that was back in 2017-2018. Since then nothing has come of it, and as others have pointed out, they've dropped football, although part of that decision is related to conference shuffling around them and not finding a conference home for football.
Maryville you dug up a press release from 2018. Other than a throw away line at the end of it, no actual news has happened since. Having to reach all the way back to 2018 doesn't inspire much confidence in the way of momentum there. Maryville's campus is located about 10 minutes from where I live, and they've been experiencing a renaissance as a university lately, adding some new sports in the last few years such as hockey, rugby at the club levels, men's and women's lacrosse and field hockey in the NCAA D2. They've built a new athletic complex for those additions and a new softball field, meanwhile renovating other existing facilities and added more dorm spaces, and have been increasing their enrollment. Additionally they partnered with the local Chesterfield Youth Hockey program to build the Maryville University Hockey Center, a lovely two sheet facility to give both Maryville and the Chesterfield Falcons a home. There is also expansion room for a third sheet of ice with additional seating and I do know the goal is to eventually build that out but that's mainly due to the need for more ice to house all the demand for the use of the facility.
Coach Hogan and those I know who work for the Maryville athletic department and the hockey team have done a great job of growing the program since it's founding back in 2018. I know coach Hogan would definitely like to see his program at the NCAA level someday as many ACHA coaches do. But from the university perspective I doubt there is much in the way of immediate movement to add an NCAA D1 hockey program, although I wouldn't entirely rule out such a move well into the future: think 2030 and beyond. In fact the university has just in the last few weeks had to go back to the drawing board on building a new basketball and Esports arena
https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis...university-esports-arena-dorm-woods-mill.html
One thing to note about Maryville as a school is that they are really out of expansion space as their campus is bordered by Interstate 64, State route 141, a hospital (that has also bought up surrounding properties), some nice neighborhoods, and an office park. so the growth they've been experiencing can only go so far right now.
UMKC has been discussed previously in this thread back in 2021, early 2022 when that article was published. Discussion about it was brief due to the fact, there has been nothing linking them to any movement on adding hockey. They just announced a new arena for basketball and volleyball, I would think if hockey was in the cards that announcement was an opportunity to include a hockey configuration in the design of it.
Kansas City Athletics Begins Next Step in Elevation; Explores New On-Campus Arena - University of Missouri-Kansas City
UPenn can check a couple of boxes on the list of needs to add a D1 hockey program. They have a rink, although it would need upgrading. And they have an endowment of $20 billion according to their own Office of Investments
About Us | Penn Office of Investments They would also pretty much have a guaranteed conference home in the ECAC if they ever did resurrect their D1 program. If they wanted hockey, they could have it. And the ACHA team was also unable to complete their own fundraising efforts to convince the university to add it. You already noted in your original post that nothing ever happened and they didn't reach their goals, so why dig it up and include it as if the news was current?