Rivier University Women’s Hockey. (Photo via Rivier University Athletics)

Our season previews continue as the 2025-2026 Men’s & Women’s Division III hockey regular season nears closer. Today, we look at the women’s side of the Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conference (MASCAC).

The MASCAC features:

Anna Maria
Framingham State
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA)
Rivier
Salem State
Worcester State

2024-2025 Overview

Last season we were introduced to the first ever season of MASCAC women’s hockey as the conference previously didn’t sponsor women’s hockey. The league still doesn’t have an automatic bid into the NCAA tournament and it’s highly unlikely anyone will receive an at-large bid, but regardless, we were treated to a special game last season in the conference championship.

In the conference title game, Rivier visited Plymouth State and it took FOUR overtimes until we decided a winner. The Panthers won it 2-1 for the first ever MASCAC conference title.

Overall, the conference was fairly weak, but some programs made strides, including the two we just mentioned, as well as Worcester State, who was T-1 in points for the regular season title race, finishing with a 10-3-2 record and 13-11-2 overall as the non-conference didn’t treat them so well.

We now enter this season with six teams, the same as last year, but Salem State joins from the dissolved NEHC and the reigning champions Plymouth State leave for the Little East Conference, new this season. The Panthers go back-to-back in joining inaugural conferences, fun fact.

Returning Production

Looking at the league and the returning production via our guy Scott Huston, we find some interesting results:

Worcester State Women’s Hockey. (Photo by Owen Jones)

Worcester State comes second in terms of returning production, the Lancers get back just under 80% of their total production, while the Rams of Framingham State, a second-year program, return just over 83%, leading the league, which makes sense considering they had an extremely young squad in their inaugural season.

Relatively speaking, the league itself returns pretty evenly percentage-wise for the most part, but again, anyone in this league outside of one or two teams can win it, it’s a complete wildcard regardless of returning production. However, I’ll still stand with my prediction, I think Rivier takes it, but Worcester State won’t shock me if it comes down to those two, which it likely will.

Dark Horses

I don’t mean to be brief here, but I don’t believe the league is dark-horse-capable. There isn’t a team in the league that will get an at-large bid and I can’t see there being any surprises from the league in the sense that there’s genuinely no one far and away better that the rest where it’s shocking if they don’t win. On the same note, the bottom of the league is a large gap from first, thus, I don’t see a team such as Framingham State competing for the upper seeds either… My pick would be Rivier or Worcester State, leaning Rivier, but I don’t think this league can have a technical ‘dark horse’ due to the performance gap between the top and bottom.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think this league is a work-in-progress, a slow cook if you will. Losing Plymouth State was huge as they’re a program on the up, but it’s also a league where there’s so many young programs and that combined have never made an NCAA tournament. I think this year and a few more after it need to be looked at as a building block for the league as a whole where hopefully more talent can be developed from it and we can get some NCAA tournament-caliber teams.

My apologies for keeping it short, but being such a new and young-program league, there’s not as much to be discussed.