The Season

Scheduling & the Season Calendar

The Season at a Glance

A dynasty year runs through a fixed sequence: preseason (schedules are built, rosters trimmed to the funded limit), the regular season (roughly 34 games from October into early March, mostly played in Friday/Saturday weekend series), conference tournaments in mid-March, The National Tournament in late March/early April, and the offseason from April through August — see The Offseason for that whole sequence.

A Friday/Saturday weekend series is taxing on a single goaltender — programs lean on a two-goalie tandem to survive the grind, and it shows on tired legs by Saturday night if you don't.

A December academic eligibility audit checks every rostered player's standing partway through the season — see Injuries & Discipline for what's at stake.

How Your Schedule Gets Built

Your schedule is rebuilt fresh every preseason. Conference games are set for you — a weekend series against every conference opponent, interleaved across the season rather than clustered together, so league play and non-conference games alternate throughout the year.

Non-conference games reflect a real philosophy, and every program in the league follows one: some chase marquee home dates against strong opponents to raise their profile; some build their resume on the road instead, seeking out quality opponents away from home; some maximize wins with a softer schedule; some stay close to home; some balance it. The schedule-builder fills your open weeks with opponents that fit your approach, while guaranteeing every team lands around a total of 34 games between conference and non-conference play combined.

Showcase tournaments — the Great Lakes Classic in December (Great Lakes Conference and Lakeshore Conference schools) and the Harbor Cup in January (Seaboard Conference and Colonial Hockey Conference's Boston-area schools) — invite that season's top 2 programs (by current prestige) from each of the two conferences, four teams total, and are locked in ahead of everything else for their participants, anchoring a marquee holiday tournament weekend on the calendar every year. If your program isn't part of either league pairing, or isn't currently one of the top 2 in your conference, those weeks are simply open non-conference dates for you like any other.

The format mirrors real small-field holiday tournaments like the Beanpot: two semifinals one week, then the following week both a championship game (the two semifinal winners) and a real consolation game (the two semifinal losers) — every invited team plays exactly twice, win or lose. Only the championship game crowns a champion, recorded on the winning program's season history; the consolation game still counts fully in the record book (results, NPI, development), it just isn't a title.

Until the semifinals are actually played, nobody knows who's in the championship or consolation game yet — your schedule, the League Scores tab, and the calendar all show that game as TBD. It fills in with the real two teams the moment both semifinals are final — and the moment it does, look for a preview story in Around the League, which gets updated with the final score and a box-score link once the championship game is actually played.

Rivalries Are Earned, Not Scripted

Some games on your schedule carry extra weight as rivalry matchups — but unlike the showcase tournaments above, a rivalry isn't a fixed historical list. It builds organically: every game you've played against an opponent, and every tournament meeting between you, raises the rivalry score between the two programs, while a wide prestige gap between you mutes it. A rivalry result carries a one-time mood swing for your roster on top of the result itself. See Team Chemistry & Player Happiness for that mood swing, and Coach Attributes & Your Career for exactly how many meetings it takes to qualify and where to browse every rivalry in the league.

Game of the Week

Every regular-season week, one matchup around the league is singled out as the week's marquee game — decided before the week is played, not after, so it's a real storyline heading in, not just a label slapped on the best result afterward.

It isn't purely about who's ranked highest. The selection favors the best combined ranking on paper, but a heated rivalry, a team on a real win streak, or a still-unbeaten team pulling into a big matchup can all win out over a slightly-better-ranked but less compelling pairing — and a team featured in back-to-back weeks gets deprioritized for a stretch afterward, so it isn't always the same one or two blue-bloods hogging the spotlight all season. Your own team is fully eligible — there's no exemption that keeps a marquee matchup involving you from getting picked.

Winning it is worth something real:

A buzz and team-mood bump — smaller than what a conference or national title earns you, since this is one game, not a season, but genuinely felt on your Program Summary.
A small nudge to your job security, named on your end-of-season board report.
Progress toward the board's Signature Win expectation and toward career Games-of-the-Week milestones on your Coach tab. See Program Prestige & Your Job Security and Coach Attributes & Your Career.
A dip instead — closing a loss out tight still reads as a moral-victory bump, but getting blown out on the big stage costs you a little of the same buzz and mood it would have earned. A game that's merely lost by a couple of goals is treated as a wash either way.

You'll see it flagged everywhere the matchup shows up — your Home dashboard's Next Game card, the League Scores tab, the matchup preview, and (if the game is actually live) a banner during the sim itself — plus a write-up in your League News feed. If it's your own team, you'll also get an inbox alert, which you can turn off independently under Settings → Notifications without affecting the news story itself.

Buy Games — Money Changes Hands

When a genuinely mismatched pair schedules a series, money moves as part of the deal:

A strong program scheduling down pays the weaker opponent for the trouble.
A weaker program reaching up for a marquee home date pays the stronger opponent to make the trip.
Two comparable programs playing each other exchange nothing.

This money flows through your Revenue Share, and league-wide it always nets to zero — it moves around, it isn't created. See Finances.

Building Your Own Schedule

Before the season locks in, you can reshape your own non-conference slate — trade out an opponent you'd rather not play for one you would. Every trade is fair to the rest of the league by design: whoever you bump, and whoever your new opponent was previously playing, both get reshuffled into a fitting replacement series rather than left stranded, and any buy-game money involved resettles automatically to match the new matchups.