AIC Is Going DII Again - What Does It Mean, and Who’s Talking?
Image Courtesy: MassMutual Center
THE YELLOW JACKETS’ HOCKEY TEAM IS JOINING THE REST OF THEIR FELLOW ATHLETES AT DII. HOW IS THE hockey world affected?
Written by James Blennau
AIC was and still is a staple of the Atlantic Hockey America conference. The 2022 Atlantic Champions’ program isn’t exactly going down on top, as they sit eighth in the standings through 10 conference games. This, and nothing else, however, has discouraged players and coaches from making their mark on the program.
The hockey world now loses a founding member of the Atlantic Hockey Conference, a 3-time conference champion, a nearly 30-year member of the Division I hockey community, and a coach who has given his heart and soul to a program that he saw grow to the recent NCAA tournament stalwart it’s become.
AIC has been the place I've called my home for over 15 years of my life, as a player, a graduate assistant, and Head Men's Ice Hockey Coach. There have been some stops here and there along the way, but something always brings me back to the institution I love.
— Eric Lang (@ericlang9) November 12, 2024
The information…
Head Coach Eric Lang became the second-longest tenured head coach in AIC hockey, only behind the man who grew the program from its roots and Lang’s former head coach, Gary Wright.
What now? Well, the short answer is that almost everything is going to change in Springfield. Per the school’s “Pathway to Progress” announcement, all player scholarships will be honored. That is if they don’t all immediately hit the transfer portal in the offseason, of course. The program will continue to operate just at a lower level, likely as a part of the NE10 conference.
Lang and his staff will likely need to find new homes across the world, but with their success in Springfield, many programs will be breaking out the checkbooks to sign for their services.
For the actual team, it’s a bit more complicated. Division II hockey operates in a sort of vacuum. While its teams can compete against the top-end DIII teams and play “buy” games against DI programs, it hasn’t had a proper championship since 1999. For NE10 schools, the conference tournament is the end of the road, and for independents, no postseason exists right now.
NE10 Hockey Tournament | Image Courtesy: Northeast 10 Conference
The other question everyone is asking though, is why? In a world where athletics revenue is only growing and NIL is growing sports beyond their communities, why bring the program down instead of investing? The school’s answer is simple: spread the wealth. Their Pathway to Progress stated that to bring ice hockey down to DII, it allows them to spread investments across the college’s athletic programs more evenly, and continue the program’s legacy without pulling the proverbial plug.
What their article didn’t mention, however, is how the college has been struggling financially. Especially when growing sports requires such investment, it’s hard to pay Lang his over $175,000 salary. It sure doesn't help that their former president is still earning over $400,000 as of the 2023 financial year either, making him their highest-paid employee at the college. With only about $300,000 of reported revenue to work within that year, it’s not hard to guess why they made such a difficult decision.
At this point, no “Save Ferris” campaign could save the program though, and the hockey world is beginning to mourn one of the great hidden gem programs of the last decade.
What’s to come in the future is unknown. The Yellow Jackets could take after other programs and still play a DI-style schedule, they could keep their status as a scholarship school, or they could carve a new path into the DII hockey world. 3-time Atlantic Champions, 4-time conference regular season champions, and a magical upset against #1 St. Cloud State in 2019 will never be forgotten. All we can do now is await the next seismic shake-up in college hockey.
