<p>What are the best schools where hockey is a pretty big deal?</p>
<p><em>cough</em>minnesota<em>cough</em>cough**</p>
<p>Wisconsin
BU
Minnesota-TC
Minnesota-Duluth
Miami (OH)
Colorado College
North Dakota
Michigan
Cornell</p>
<p>etc.</p>
<p>The bean pot is a pretty big deal in the New England area or atleast in MA.</p>
<p>Northeastern, BC, BU, and to a lesser extent Harvard are good hockey schools.</p>
<p>University of New Hampshire</p>
<p>University of Vermont</p>
<p>[NCAA</a> Men’s Ice Hockey Championship - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Four]NCAA”>NCAA Division I men's ice hockey tournament - Wikipedia)
[2009</a> NCAA Division I Men’s Ice Hockey Tournament - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_NCAA_Men’s_Division_I_Ice_Hockey_Tournament]2009”>2009 NCAA Division I men's ice hockey tournament - Wikipedia)
[2008</a> NCAA Division I men’s ice hockey bracket - College Sports - ESPN](<a href=“http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?page=08menshockeybracket]2008”>2008 NCAA Division I men's ice hockey bracket - ESPN)</p>
<p>Note: this is limited to USA</p>
<p>Miami University in Ohio and University of Denver both take their hockey pretty seriously</p>
<p>cornell and harvard… at least that’s what I heard when I went to visit :)</p>
<p>I can’t believe you all missed UMaine! - the most fanatical hockey school in the country (in my opinion, though right now the team isn’t great)</p>
<p>All those mentioned above, + U Denver.</p>
<p>Wisconsin has the best combo men’s and womens’s teams. They are building a new arena so the women have their own place to play on campus. Men draw nearly 12,000/game.</p>
<p>[BadgerBeat.com</a> - Wisconsin Badgers hockey: New facility has a start time](<a href=“http://www.badgerbeat.com/blog/blog/id/459834]BadgerBeat.com”>http://www.badgerbeat.com/blog/blog/id/459834)</p>
<p>Harvard might have a good team, but does the average student care? At least at Cornell the students actually follow hockey and go to the games.</p>
<p>Go BU! NCAA Champs 
:)</p>
<p>BC Sucks.</p>
<p>"Harvard might have a good team, but does the average student care? "</p>
<p>don’t know about Harvard, but this is about Yale:
[Yale</a> Daily News - Hockey sees fans and a fight - Print](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/printarticle/27585]Yale”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/printarticle/27585)</p>
<p>Princeton has also gotten very good, in recent years.</p>
<p>BU is really good. And I hate BU.</p>
<h1>14 was a common sentiment back in my college days.</h1>
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<p>Hah! Cornell hasn’t won a national championship since 1970. Harvard hasn’t won since 1989. They’re both good, for Ivies, but college hockey has become a bigtime sport at many Division I schools that offer athletic scholarships and the Ivies can’t really compete anymore on a national level.</p>
<p>BC and BU are perennial men’s hockey powers nationally. So are Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Denver, and Maine. </p>
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<p>Actually, Minnesota and Wisconsin are very evenly matched in both men’s and women’s hockey, each with multiple national championships in both the men’s and women’s sport. Naturally they are ferocious rivals.</p>
<p>I’d say for the best combination of academics and athletics, it’s Michigan, Wisconsin, BC, and Minnesota, in that order. If you want to tip in the direction of academics over athletics, I’d say Harvard #1, Cornell #2, Michigan #3.</p>
<p>Well our men’s team is amazing hear in Minnesota obviously, but I’d have to say Minnesota-Duluth’s women’s team is better than ours and Wisconsins’. </p>
<p>And throw Notre Dame into your academics/athletics lists as well.</p>
<p>“Hah! Cornell hasn’t won a national championship since 1970.”</p>
<p>The OP’s question was, and I quote,</p>
<p>“What are the best schools where hockey is a pretty big deal?”</p>
<p>It was not “which schools are best in hockey?”</p>
<p>Granted the two are usually correlated.</p>
<p>In the case of Cornell, hockey remains a pretty big deal there. They are also still (or again) pretty good at it, they made it to the NCAA tournament regional finals this past year. Nowhere near where they were in the 60s-70s, in terms of national prominence, but fan enthusiasm nevertheless remains high. Which was directly to the OPs question. Their league has gotten quite competitive and exciting within itself, and they are generally up there in it, regardless of national stature.</p>
<p>What happened I think is, during the glory years a fan culture developed, such that the fan antics eventually came to equal or transcend the actual games in entertainment value. The games effectively became an excuse for the fan performance. Sort of like how some people are into The Rocky Horror Picture show whether or not it is actually a great film.</p>
<p>They like, and care about, the actual hockey too though. But the bulk of what fans see is in-league competition which as I said has actually been quite competitive within itself, and exciting. So with all this, fan enthusiasm remains high there.</p>
<p>Well, the UW women have one three of the last 4 NCAA championships and lost in the tourney the other year. For a program that started playing in 1999 that’s pretty dominant. The men last won it in 2006 and the coach may not be up to the job. UM-D is good too.
I’d like to see a Big 10 plus ND hockey league eventually. Just need another B10 school to add the sport for men.</p>
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<p>No, I don’t think they’re correlated. Lots of top academic schools don’t give a hoot about hockey. And lots of top hockey schools don’t give a hoot about academics. I tried to give a list of schools that excel in both. But I take your point that’s not what the OP asked. If the criterion is 1) best schools where 2) hockey is a big deal (regardless of actual quality of the hockey program), then I’d say:</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Michigan</li>
<li>Middlebury (8 Division III championships in last 15 years)</li>
<li>Amherst (recent strength in hockey)</li>
<li>Williams</li>
<li>Notre Dame (recent strength in hockey)</li>
<li>Wisconsin</li>
<li>Boston College</li>
</ol>
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<p>Yes, and the Minnesota women have won 2 of the last 6 titles and lost the title game a third time, and were the first in the country to have their own arena—Wisconsin, I believe, was second, but in any case followed the Minnesota women in that regard. But the truly dominant women’s ice hockey team is Minnesota-Duluth, which has won 4 national titles on the last 9 years, and lost in the title game in a 5th attempt over that period.</p>
<p>Look, I don’t mean to take anything away from Wisconsin hockey. It’s terrific, both in the men’s and women’s game. My only point is that they’re pretty evenly matched with Minnesota. Between the two of them, and taking into account both the men’s and women’s game, Minnesota and Wisconsin are probably the two most hockey-crazed schools in the country. No one else at their level. And I say this as a Michigan alum. Hockey’s big there but it pales in comparison to football, and women’s hockey just isn’t on the map. Not so at Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Big Ten football is a warm-up to the hockey season.</p>