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Team & Conference Histories

Great Lakes Conference — Program Histories

Seven programs, the widest range of history in any of the league's conferences: a century-old blue blood, a "sleeping giant" with the deepest trophy case in the league and the lowest current prestige to show for it, and two of the newest arrivals to serious competition anywhere in the game. See Team & Conference Histories for what this is and isn't.

Huron State Voyageurs

Ask any coach in the Great Lakes Conference which program sets the bar, and the answer is almost always Huron State. The Voyageurs' first varsity season came in 1922, three years after a student club began scrimmaging on a frozen bend of the Huron River the program still takes its name from, and the school has rarely finished a season outside the conference's upper half in the century since.

That consistency was built in three distinct stretches rather than one long unbroken run: a defense-heavy roster won three championships in five years during the early 1950s, a deep and well-connected recruiting class carried the program through the late 1970s and 1980s, and a third title-caliber roster in the mid-2000s rounded out a trophy case no conference rival has matched.

The program's oldest fixture is the Cross-State Series against in-state neighbor Saginaw State — the two have played every season since 1926, and the game routinely decides conference positioning even when neither side is chasing a title. Both programs credit the rivalry's intensity for recruiting pipelines that outkick what their state's population alone would predict.

Huron State enters most seasons as the prohibitive favorite to finish atop the Great Lakes Conference, and supporters are more likely to point to that decade-after-decade consistency than to any single banner as proof of the program's standing. Beating Huron State, more than winning any specific title, remains the unofficial bar every rebuilding rival in the conference is trying to clear.

Saginaw State Foresters

The Foresters nickname isn't just color: Saginaw State fielded its first team in 1925 at what was then a modest regional teachers' college, mostly to give a booming lumber-town population something to do in the winter, and the timber-industry name has outlasted the industry itself by nearly a century.

The program's defining chapter arrived in the 1980s under a coaching staff that turned Saginaw State into the first program in the conference willing to genuinely contest Huron State rather than simply survive its schedule — back-to-back conference championships that remain the standard every subsequent Foresters roster has chased ever since.

That breakthrough cemented the Cross-State Series as the emotional center of the program's calendar, and Saginaw State has stayed close enough to Huron State ever since that the rivalry has never gone stale — no small feat against a program with three separate championship eras of its own.

Saginaw State has rarely gone more than two seasons without qualifying for the national tournament field since that 1980s peak — the longest active such streak of any Great Lakes Conference program not named Huron State — and supporters treat a Cross-State Series win as its own reward regardless of where the Foresters land in the standings.

Mendota State Anglers

Long before Mendota State built an indoor arena, its earliest teams practiced directly on the lake the program is named for — a detail still worked into the Anglers' oldest traditions today, dating back to the program's founding in 1935.

The style that eventually made Mendota State a genuine national contender was forged, not inherited: a grinding, defense-first system installed in the late 1990s carried the program to two national semifinal appearances by the mid-2000s and proved the Anglers could beat anyone in a single elimination game regardless of seed.

That physical style is on full display every year against Northstar State in the Boundary Cup, a border rivalry that has less to do with current standings than with Northstar State's sheer historical weight — the two programs have made a habit of playing their most-attended non-title game of the season against each other, state line or no state line.

Mendota State hasn't recaptured the frequency of deep tournament runs from its 2000s peak, but the physical, low-event style that got it there has never left — the Anglers remain the team every higher-seeded Great Lakes Conference program least wants to draw in a single-elimination game.

Allegheny State Ironhawks

Allegheny State fielded a club team as early as 1971, but for four decades that's all it ever was — a self-funded afterthought with no scholarships and no real ambition. That changed a little over ten years ago, when a nine-figure gift from a prominent alumni couple funded a full varsity elevation and, with it, one of the finest new arenas in the conference.

The Ironhawks didn't waste the investment. Within its first several varsity seasons the program climbed from the bottom of the conference standings into the league's upper half — the fastest such rise by any Great Lakes Conference program in the modern era — on the strength of recruiting classes the school's brief club history never suggested were coming.

Its rivalry with neighboring Scioto State, played as the Turnpike Series after the highway connecting both campuses, is still young by the conference's standards — barely a decade old — but the two programs have already delivered enough tight, late-season, tournament-seeding-on-the-line finishes that both fan bases have stopped calling it a formality.

Allegheny State hasn't won a signature championship yet, and its supporters are candid that the program's current standing reflects real investment rather than a single breakout class. What the Ironhawks haven't done — win it all — is the one thing left separating a genuinely fast rise from a genuinely complete one.

Scioto State Buckhorns

Scioto State didn't add hockey until 1950, decades after the university had already built its athletic identity around football and basketball, and the Buckhorns have never quite escaped that shadow — the program is, and has mostly always been, the school's fourth-most-discussed sport at best.

That hasn't stopped the Buckhorns from occasionally crashing the postseason — tournament appearances in the 1980s and again in the 2000s both briefly raised expectations — but neither run turned into the kind of multi-year contention that gets remembered as a defining chapter. Scioto State's history reads as a string of near-misses rather than one clear peak.

What the program lacks in banners it makes up for at the gate: Scioto State's per-game attendance is routinely the best in the conference relative to its actual results, propped up by a fan base that shows up for the university's broader athletic brand whether the hockey team is any good that year or not.

That built-in support has kept facilities investment flowing even through lean stretches, and it's now colliding with a genuinely rising Allegheny State in an increasingly serious geographic rivalry. Whether the Turnpike Series becomes the stage for Scioto State's first real signature run — rather than one more near-miss — is the open question hanging over the program.

Northstar State Loons

No program in the Great Lakes Conference is harder to size up at a glance than Northstar State. Founded in 1921 — a year before Huron State and the oldest program in the conference — the Loons spent much of the 20th century as the region's undisputed standard, which makes the program's current standing a source of real, ongoing frustration for its supporters.

That standard was earned the hard way: a mid-century dynasty running from the 1930s into the early 1950s produced more total championships than any other program that would eventually join the Great Lakes Conference, and Northstar State's trophy case is still the largest in the conference by a comfortable margin. For most of the 20th century, beating Northstar State was how a rival program announced its own arrival.

The last decade and a half has told a very different story. A run of coaching changes and recruiting classes that never quite lived up to their rankings have left Northstar State with the lowest prestige of any Great Lakes Conference member — the widest gap between historical pedigree and present-day standing anywhere in the sport, and the reason rival fan bases across the conference have taken to calling the Loons the league's sleeping giant.

The Boundary Cup against Mendota State remains fiercely contested regardless, if only because Northstar State's history keeps the stakes feeling bigger than the current standings justify. Around the rest of the conference, the same joke gets repeated every offseason: the Loons are one good recruiting class away from being everyone's problem again.

Notre Cross Shamrocks

Ask a Notre Cross fan to name the program's defining moment and you'll get the same answer almost every time: a narrow, still-discussed loss in a national championship game in the 2010s. That the Shamrocks' single biggest moment came as a runner-up says a lot about a program that only fielded its first team in 1968 and spent decades afterward with no conference to call home at all.

For most of the 20th century Notre Cross scheduled itself year to year as an independent, taking on whichever programs would agree to play it. That changed only when the school became a founding member of the Great Lakes Conference in the early 2010s — giving the Shamrocks a permanent conference identity for the first time in the program's history, decades after most of its current conference-mates already had one.

A meaningful share of Notre Cross's hockey following didn't come from hockey at all — the school's broader athletic department carries a large, nationally distributed fan base that has adopted the hockey program as it's gotten more competitive, giving Notre Cross a recruiting profile well beyond what its short competitive history would otherwise support.

That growing relevance has sharpened a geographic rivalry with Saginaw State, born of the two campuses sitting on opposite sides of the Michigan-Indiana border, into a genuine conference fixture. With the shortest true competitive history of any Great Lakes Conference program, Notre Cross is still closer to its origin story than its legacy — whatever that legacy turns out to be is mostly still ahead of it.

The Great Lakes Conference

The Great Lakes Conference was formed in the early 2010s when seven of the region's largest athletic departments split away from an older, broader alliance to build a hockey conference scheduled around television revenue and built-in geographic rivalries — a restructuring that mirrored similar realignments across other sports at the same institutions. Every member plays big-time football and basketball, and for most of the conference's schools hockey remains a proud but secondary flagship sport.

Two exceptions define the conference's competitive identity. At Huron State and Saginaw State, hockey carries a cultural weight closer to the schools' marquee sports, and the annual Cross-State Series between the two programs is widely regarded as the conference's signature rivalry — a game that has been played every season since 1926, long before either school had heard of the conference they'd eventually join together.

The conference's membership spans an unusually wide range of program histories for a group this size: Northstar State (1921) is the oldest program in the league and its most storied "sleeping giant," while Notre Cross and Allegheny State represent the conference's two newest arrivals to serious competition, one through a recent conference realignment and the other through a generational facilities investment. That mix of century-old pedigree and 21st-century ambition has made the Great Lakes Conference one of the sport's most closely watched leagues nationally, with several programs capable of a deep tournament run in any given season.

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