2022 U18 Women's World Championship: Day 6 - Gold and Bronze Medal Games →

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Gold Medal Game

Canada 3, USA 2

Canada coach Howie Draper said his team was coming together and I should have believed him. They peaked at exactly the right time and came out flying on Monday night, putting the US in a 3-0 hole they couldn't dig themselves out of.

If you'd have said before the tournament that not only would Canada be playing in a quarterfinal, but that they’d be happy they did, I'm not sure anyone would have agreed with you. But it turns out having those extra 60 minutes of ice time together may have been the difference between gold and silver.

"We needed that game to find ourselves and find our unity on the ice," said Draper.

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NCAA Women's Hockey: Ohio State are the 2022 National Champions →

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Kenzie Hauswirth's shot from the near boards deflected off the skate of UMD's Nina Jobst-Smith past Emma Söderberg to score the game-winning goal and give the Buckeyes their first-ever National Championship Sunday.

After not getting on the board first for much of the playoffs, OSU had opened the scoring with a hustle play from Paetyn Levis and Clair DeGeorge on the power play. Ohio State averaged just less than a power play goal a game this season, scoring 36 in 37 games.

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Division I Women’s Hockey: NCAA removes minimizing flights from bracket selection criteria →

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The NCAA formally approved the expansion of the the women’s hockey tournament to 11 teams for the 2021-22 season yesterday. But two big changes to the women’s bracket selection process were also quietly made.

The women’s hockey pre-championship manual has always included a stipulation to prioritize cost reduction and fewer flights when setting up the quarterfinal matchups. “Pairings in the quarterfinal round shall be based primarily on the teams’ geographical proximity to one another, regardless of their region, in order to avoid air travel in quarterfinal-round games whenever possible.” (View the 2019 pre-championship manual here. Criteria on pages 13-14.)

As first reported by Todd Milewski in the Wisconsin State Journal, that criteria has been removed from women’s hockey championship selection criteria.

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Division I Women’s Hockey: NCAA approves immediate expansion of bracket; 11 teams to compete in 2022 National Championship tournament →

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The NCAA announced Thursday it has approved an immediate expansion of the women’s ice hockey championship bracket from eight teams to 11 teams. The expansion will take place for the 2022 tournament. The 2022 Frozen Four is being hosted at Penn State March 18-20, 2022.

Per the release: “The 2022 National Collegiate Women’s Ice Hockey Championship will feature the top five seeds in the tournament receiving a first-round bye. The fifth-seeded team will play at the campus site of one of the top four seeds. Three first-round games will be played at the campus sites of three of the top four seeds in the tournament.

The winners of the first-round games will have a day off before playing in the quarterfinals. The tournament will stay on its current schedule since no weekends will be added with this format.”

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NCAA Division I Women’s Hockey: Coaches, teams organize on social media to demand expanded tournament field →

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The NCAA Championship Oversight Committee will convene November 10th to immediately reconsider the petition to expand the women’s hockey tournament from 8 to 12 teams for this season.

According to UMD coach Maura Crowell, this comes as a response to the findings from the report published by Kaplan, Hecker and Fink (KHF) law offices last week detailing gender inequities in the NCAA. (Read more about what the report said about college hockey here.)

The report, published on October 25, detailed gender inequities across a number of NCAA sports, but the disparities in hockey were particularly bad. With the new meeting a week away, it was important to make sure the information in the report continues to be noticed, discussed, disseminated and taken seriously.

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Phase II NCAA external gender equity review report details disparities in women’s, men’s college hockey →

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After videos went viral last March detailing the inferior weight room setup provided to the women’s basketball championship, NCAA president Mark Emmert commissioned an external gender equity review across all sports.

Phase one of the report came out in early August and focused specifically on men’s and women’s basketball. Monday’s report was the second phase and detailed inequities across all other NCAA-sponsored sports.

The 154 page report can be found here and it should be required reading for anyone involved in sports. The majority of the report is a breakdown of inequities in individual sports, but the opening 60 pages do a stellar job of showing how the problems shown therein are systemic, problematic and fixable.

This report contained no information that was surprising or groundbreaking to anyone that has spent time around the NCAA and in particular, women’s college hockey. The inequities are not new. While helpful to have the information gathered and reported from an outside source and freely available to the general public, it also does not matter if the report does not incite major change.

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