BOWLING GREEN — The Central Collegiate Hockey Association will live again.
Seven schools that are leaving the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, including Bowling Green, announced Tuesday they plan to revive the defunct league of which BG was a founding member.
In June, 2019, Bowling Green announced it would form a new league with six other members of the current WCHA: the two Minnesota schools in the league, Bemidji State and Minnesota State; and the four northern Michigan schools with Division I programs in Michigan Tech, Northern Michigan, Ferris State, and Lake Superior State.
The move will leave behind three remaining members of the WCHA: Alaska, Alaska-Anchorage, and Alabama-Huntsville.
According to a press release announcing the move, the new CCHA does not have a definite timeline, but the schools are on track to start play with the 2021-22 season.
Bowling Green owned all of the CCHA’s rights and properties after the league dissolved in 2013 following extensive conference realignment, and the Falcons’ new league and old league eventually became one in the same.
Dr. Morris Kurtz, a hockey consultant leading the seven schools through the process, said in a prepared statement that reviving the old league was the best option.
"After extensive discussion and significant due diligence, it made sense to everyone involved to move in this direction,” Kurtz said. “The name conveys the current geographic alignment of our members and the CCHA brand has a tremendous amount of equity and goodwill associated with it.
“What's old is new again and we look forward to refreshing the brand and identity to fully capture the energy and passion of the institutions it represents."
Bowling Green played in the CCHA from 1971 through 2013, and it became the first member school to win a national championship when it captured its only national title in 1984.
The old CCHA, which included Ohio State, Miami, Michigan, Michigan State, and Notre Dame, among others, became a victim of the wave of conference realignment that drastically altered college hockey. Billionaire Terry Pegula’s nine-figure donation in 2010 helped Penn State start a Division I hockey program, giving the Big Ten a sixth varsity hockey program — enough to form a conference with an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
The three full Big Ten members in the CCHA left to join PSU in the Big Ten, as did Minnesota and Wisconsin. (Notre Dame has since joined the Big Ten as a hockey-only member.)
The remaining members of the CCHA fled to join other conferences, and BG latched on in the WCHA along with former CCHA peers Northern Michigan, Ferris State, and Lake Superior State. Michigan Tech also had a previous stint in the CCHA from 1981 to 1984.
During its previous stint in the league, BG finished in first place seven times and won five tournament championships.
The seven departing members will play in the WCHA for at least the 2020-21 season, but expressed their desire to form an “elite” conference when they declared their intention to leave in 2019.
In a joint statement, the seven Midwestern schools said then they "are like-minded in their goals and aspirations for the potential new league with a focus on improving regional alignment and the overall student-athlete experience while building natural rivalries within a more compact geographic footprint."
First Published February 18, 2020, 11:26 p.m.
