In six years with a women’s hockey program, Syracuse has never made the NCAA tournament. It’s lacked the pedigree for an at-large bid and has settled for three College Hockey America tournament finals instead.

Had the Orange won any of those games, it still probably wouldn’t have made the NCAA tournament.

This year, though, a CHA tournament title would guarantee SU a spot in the national tournament.

Now with six stable teams, the CHA gained an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament starting this season. The winner of the CHA tournament at the end of the season will be one of the eight teams competing for a national championship. Syracuse (2-3-5, 1-0-1 CHA) players and coaches use the auto-bid as extra motivation, as conference play started last weekend.

“It’s just recognizing our sport, our league, nationally,” SU head coach Paul Flanagan said. “We’re a league that’s trying to continue to grow and we are — teams are doing very well.”

Mercyhurst is the only CHA team to have ever made the NCAA tournament. Now that the conference is better recognized, Flanagan and Mercyhurst head coach Michael Sisti hope multiple teams can make the tournament in the same year.

Without a conference auto-bid, SU had to worry more about early-season games, needing to boost its resume for an at-large bid from the start of the season.

Now the Orange can take advantage of the familiarity it has with conference opponents and use the early season to work on improving as a team.

“We’ve had a lot of great players in this league, some great rivalries,” Sisti said. “I think the league has been respected but … (now) you know for sure (it) will have representation in the national tournament.”

Sisti’s team has consistently made the tournament without an auto-bid and views that as a testament to Mercyhurst’s program. The auto-bid doesn’t add as much to the program as a result.

Although the auto-bid lessens the importance of nonconference games, it increases that of conference play. All six teams make the CHA tournament at regular season’s end, but the top two receive a first-round bye.

“It’s hard to think of it right now because we’ve only played two games but that one point, you don’t know in sports,” Flanagan said after the second game against Penn State on Saturday, in which the teams tied on a late PSU goal.

Flanagan said the coaches are using the auto-bid as an unstated motivator for the rest of the season. It’s easy for players to be motivated for every game when they know there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.

SU has to play every conference game like it’s “our last playoff game,” Flanagan added.

The players too have talked about the auto-bid as a motivator and recognize the increased importance of conference play.

“Now we can really focus on, ‘OK, we have to win all our conference games and if we do that, we’re going. We’re good,’” SU goalie Jenn Gilligan said.

Down the road, Flanagan and SU assistant coach Brendon Knight see the new status of the CHA paying off in recruiting. The best players, Knight said, want to play for a championship competitor and now SU can pitch itself as such every year.

Flanagan said that it was easy for other schools to be critical of SU and other CHA schools during the recruiting process. The league lacked stability and only one member school has made the NCAA tournament.

And aside from giving CHA teams a better chance of playing in the NCAA tournament, the auto-bid serves as validation for Syracuse and the conference.

“You come here, you got a chance,” Flanagan said of a recruiting pitch, “you’re always going to be in the mix to play in the NCAAs.”

Published on November 5, 2014 at 12:07 am