2026-27 Men’s Preview & Analysis: The Conference of New England (CNE)

Welcome back to another year of Division III hockey & DIIIHockeyNews.com! To begin our season previews as the 2026-27 Men’s & Women’s Division III hockey seasons creep upon us, with preseason games beginning in just three weeks. We’ll begin with the Conference of New England (CNE) and preview the men’s side of things.

Last year, we went in alphabetical order in terms of conferences, this year, we’re going to go with the flow and release different conferences in no particular order. However, men’s and women’s articles will always come out together, for example, our CNE women’s preview article will be released in the coming days, we will not switch leagues until both sides have been released.

We’ll discuss various aspects of this league including how our analysis fared last year, as well as returning production, dark horses, and some general analysis!

Currently, the CNE features:

Curry
Endicott
Johnson & Wales
Nichols
Roger Williams
Salve Regina (left CNE after 2023-24 season, affiliate member as of 26-27)
Suffolk
University of New England
Wentworth
Western New England

2025-2026 Overview

Last season, we saw two CNE teams (three if you count newly named affiliate member Salve Regina) qualify for the NCAA Tournament. Endicott (21-4-3), the conference champion who received the league’s auto-bid, held the #2 seed in the tournament, while University of New England (21-7-0), held the #9 seed after falling to Endicott in the championship game 2-1. Salve Regina, who held Independent status for the 2025-26 season, also qualified for the tournament (17-4-0) via an at-large bid. Despite Salve not holding CNE-status, we’ll make note of them here since they’ve re-joined the league for this coming season and beyond.

As mentioned, Endicott College, led by head coach RJ Tolan, took home their 3rd conference championship in four seasons and 5th overall as Curry won the league in the previous 2024-25 season. The Gulls were led by their strong freshman class as their top three point scorers and goaltender were all first-year players. Louie Kamienski led the way with 28 points (12G, 16A), while Noah Gibbs (14G, 12A) & Sebastian Speck (8G, 17A) were close behind. Adding to this, sophomore Jack Costanzo was 4th on the team, tallying 25 points (7G, 18A). Also building their case that they arguably had the best freshman class in Division III in terms of pure production, the Gulls had freshman goaltender Peter Sterling, Sterling finished with a record of 21-4-2, holding a 1.63 GAA & .933 save-%. The Gulls had multiple players on our All-Rookie Team and All-American awards. They would go on to receive a first-round bye in the NCAA tournament, hosting Aurora University who defeated the MIAC champion Saint John’s in the first round. The Spartans defeated Endicott in double-overtime 3-2 to advance to their first-ever Frozen Four, eliminating the lone-remaining CNE team from the dance.

The other team who returned to the NCAA tournament as mentioned was Univ. New England, finding themselves in the dance after a few nights sweating out the NPI as the Nor’Easters had the most shuffling of anyone during the final few moments. UNE would make the trip to De Pere, WI to face St. Norbert College (22-7-2), in the final game of the Cornerstone Community Center’s history as they’re opening a new state-of-the-art arena for this coming 2026-27 season. This game would be one of the most exciting of the entire tournament as UNE held a 3-2 lead after the opening period, followed by a game-tying fourth goal with 30 seconds remaining in the 3rd, only to see the Green Knights score the winner a mere 18 seconds later, winning the game 5-4 in the final 15 seconds of action.

Once again, the CNE showed their strength as they featured a pair of NCAA tournament teams, along with some major improvements and promise from the rest of the league, showing their added depth. We’ll look at how the league as a whole performed top-to-bottom throughout this article.

FINAL REGULAR-SEASON STANDINGS 2025-26:

How our analysis panned out

Last season, I wrote preview articles for each league, noting some thoughts and analysis as we will do here, if you would like to read last season’s CNE preview article, click here. Otherwise, we’ll briefly circle back to see how I did in terms of ‘predicting’ / making educated guesses as to what would occur last season. I’m doing this to preface that of course we aren’t perfect, but we [Scott & Myself] have a pretty solid clue on what to lookout for and some notable stats/offseason occurrences to keep an eye on as we enter a new season.

*Keep in mind, this section can vary in length for each conference depending on what was said in last year’s article, it can be brief, or more detailed, some leagues had more ‘predictions’ & ‘analysis’ than others. 

Starting off on a good note, my ‘dark horse’ entering last season was Suffolk University. Suffolk was coming off some solid improved seasons under their first-ever full-time head coach Shawn McEachern and his staff. McEachern enters his fourth season this coming 2026-27 season and will be looking to do even more come CNE playoff time. The Rams actually outdid themselves in my preseason analysis:

“I would like to think they can pull off an upset win and/or tie here and there, putting themselves in at least the fourth spot in the league, maybe challenge for third. I can’t see them getting past the top three during the regular season simply because of how strong those teams have been, they’ll need to prove they can play with those teams night-in and night-out, but I won’t be shocked if they pull an upset in the league playoffs or split a few weekends.”

It turns out Suffolk did crack the top three in the regular season and it was by a decent margin, five points clear of the defending champions Curry College as they had themselves a down year, coming off their best season in program history. In 2025-26, Suffolk held a 1-1-1 record against Endicott, 1-2-0 against Curry, & 1-1-0 vs UNE, very respectable and were clearly (in my opinion) the third best team in the league from start to finish all things considered. Adding on to this point, using Scott’s ‘Returning Production‘ graph, we could see Suffolk returned approximately 92.31% of total team points, which gave me another reason to believe Suffolk was primed for a breakout season. The Rams would fall to Endicott 4-1 in the CNE semifinals, but a great season of accomplishment, nonetheless.

Some other analysis included my belief the league would have at minimum two bids into the NCAA tournament, not exactly a difficult call, but correct, nonetheless. I was also optimistic about how Endicott would fare considering RJ Tolan is known for loading up on D-I transfers and not exactly relying on freshman in the box score. This curiosity led to a big surprise as the Gulls had an incredible season and were led as mentioned, by their youth talent. It will be interesting to see if this trend becomes the norm for the Gulls, or if we see another influx of transfers in the next few seasons as more ‘D-I quality’ players come calling from the transfer portal.

Returning Production

Disclaimer via Scott: “I did the best I could to predict these rosters going forward, as I believe all players with exhausted eligibility are out of the equation.  NOTE: Transfers are a bit tricky, as I only took players off who were absent from the final rosters of 2025-26, and players who have confirmed found a new spot.”

Looking at the league and the estimated returning production via our guy Scott Huston, let’s rank the teams based on total returning cumulative points:

1. Roger Williams: 96.12%
2. Suffolk: 92.95%
3. Nichols: 87.79%
4. Johnson & Wales: 85.37%
5. Endicott: 76.47%
6. Salve Regina: 56.46%
7. Wentworth: 54.35%
8. Univ. New England: 52.87%
9. Curry: 50%
10. Western New England: 44.53%

As we look at these numbers, a few things stand out and we’ll discuss the significance. First, Roger Williams returns the most at just over 96%, which makes sense considering they’re entering their second season as a program and they only lost one player to graduation, along with two reported transfers. This is very typical from newer programs, so nothing to note here other than I’d like to believe we see improvements from RWU in games against the middle-top of the standings as last season they showed promise, getting wins over UMass-Dartmouth in their inaugural game, WNE 2x, Wentworth, Framingham State, Suffolk, along with a tie & shootout win over Endicott… The Hawks finished 6-18-1, but a few games in particular show that if things continue in the right direction, they’re on a path to make some noise within the middle of the standings.

Suffolk as we’ve talked about quite a bit, brings back nearly 93% of their production, which on paper, should mean the Rams will continue building what they put together last season winning 17 games. In net, they return (now sophomore) Austin McNicholas, McNicholas played 26 games last season, finishing with a 16-9-1 record, 2.04 GAA, & .910 save-%. Similar to Endicott, the Rams return their production which came mostly from youth talent, I fully expect Suffolk to be right back in the mix and be fighting for the 3-4 seed in the CNE standings (considering the CNE addition of Salve Regina).

Nichols finished last season 11-15-1, going 0-10-1 against the top four (CC, END, SU, UNE), the lone tie (shootout win) coming against Curry, who they later defeated in the CNE playoffs to end Curry’s poor finish to the regular season going 1-3-1 in their final five games (1-4-1 if you count playoffs). The Bison would end their season in a 10-0 loss to Univ. New England, but again, returning a lot of production, we could see them maybe knocking off a few of those teams come this season, as they seemed to handle the middle-to-bottom of the league quite well, finishing with a record of 7-2-0.

The main note I’ll mention with Univ. New England is that they’ve been no stranger to the transfer portal, but they’ve typically brought in a few key pieces to add to their ‘homegrown’ talent. This season, they’ll add Tyler Samodral who was one of the many Chatham transfers this offseason. Samodral tallied 14G & 14A in 26 games during his sophomore campaign with the Cougars, prior to this, he had a 16-point (8G, 8A) freshman season. Look for him to be a good contributor for the Nor’Easters this season along with the returning All-American pieces on offense, seniors Dominic Murphy & Drew Olivieri, putting up 41- & 42-points last season, respectively. Murphy & Olivieri will be the clear leaders this coming season for their senior campaigns.

Lastly, as mentioned earlier, Endicott has returned one of the best freshman classes (in terms of team-leading production) that we’ve seen in some time. The Gulls, who typically lean portal instead of homegrown talent as of late, bring back 76% of their points last season, but the key here is their top trio of point-getters were freshman and their freshman goaltender who put up an incredible season returns as well. Granted, they do lose some key senior-class pieces, so it’s not a guarantee that they’ll be right back where they left off, but there aren’t many programs that can say their top three point-getters and star goaltender will all be returning as sophomores. Expect Endicott to be right where they left off, contending for the CNE title once again.

Dark Horses

It’s hard to pick a ‘dark horse’ in this league now because my pick was always Suffolk due to their potential, returning production, & new coaching staff, but now given the parity the league has shown, it’s tough to pick an underdog to come out of the woodwork. Endicott, Curry, & UNE have shown year-in & year-out they’re the class of the league, Suffolk is now here and will continue to disrupt the big three as we just saw this past season. The team I think outside of these four that will make some noise and for a different reason is Salve Regina as the Seahawks make their way back into the league and are no longer under independent status.

I think with Salve out of the picture the past two seasons, the overall landscape may have forgotten about how good they’ve historically been in the CNE. With their brief absence now ending, we’ll get to see the Seahawks in meaningful games against big time opponents, adding to the league’s overall depth and strength. So, in short, I really do not have a ‘dark horse’ outside of the top five teams, I believe the bottom five from last season (Nichols, JWU, Wentworth, Roger Williams, & WNE) all have a lot of work to do before we start to consider them a challenger in the league on a week-in, week-out basis. This isn’t saying we won’t see any upsets, we always do, but I cannot see any of these five finishing higher than 6th with Salve back. The gap last season between 4th & 5th was 17 points… Curry finished with 40 and the next closest was Nichols with 23, it’s simply too big of a gap for me to pick one of the five to make a ton of consistent league-wide noise.

Despite their history in the league, Salve does lose a lot of production and goaltending as we mentioned above, but with the favorable schedule to begin the season (no, this isn’t speaking negatively about them as the conference schedule is largely out of anyone’s control), they’ll be able to get their chemistry grooved, as they begin the season with two uncountable non-conference games against newly D-II (NE-10) American International College, followed by CNE games against WNE, JWU, & Nichols, they’ll then get Southern Maine and Worcester State to round out semester one. For the new year, they’re hosting the Seahawk Invitational where they’ll face Albright College (inaugural season) where Salve will be a massive favorite, followed by either Hiram or Assumption (NE-10). Long story short, the Seahawks will be able to get their groove and chemistry up before their main conference competition against the ‘big three’ & Suffolk, with all of those games being played between January 15 – February 20.

With that being said, my minor ‘dark horse’ with all of those factors above, is Salve Regina, I believe they’ll make a run at the top 2-3 of the regular season, while potentially making a CNE championship appearance.

Final Thoughts

Like last season, my thoughts on the Conference of New England are very similar, in that it’ll continue to be a top conference in Division III men’s hockey and there’s lots of reasons to be intrigued for this upcoming season. Curry will be looking to get back to the conference title game and the NCAA tournament after a disappointing close to their last month of the season. All last season, Curry simply never seemed to get their groove back and find their identity following their Frozen Four run. Granted, losing Shane Soderwall to Clarkson (NCAA D-I) may have something to do with that, but nevertheless, I’m intrigued to see how the Colonels return this season.

This league unless all ‘you know what’ breaks loose, will feature at minimum, two bids into the NCAA tournament and will give us great, parity-filled hockey week-in and week-out. For me, the main story is to see what Endicott can do returning their key pieces, along with Univ. New England returning their top-two point leaders, along with a nice portal addition in Tyler Samodral.

Here’s to another great season of Division III hockey and thank you for reading our first preview article of the season! Our CNE women’s preview will be out in the coming days!