UND Cuts Women’s Hockey While Team Practiced, Had Recruit in for Visit

Due to an anticipated decrease in state funds, the University of North Dakota announced on Wednesday that it is cutting its women’s hockey and men’s and women’s swimming and diving programs after this year. The athletic department was informed by the university president that it had to shed $1.3 million from its budget and the women’s hockey team, which has been ranked anywhere from second to fourth in attendance since 2010 in all of Division I, was among the first to go.

The decision to cut the program evidently caught the team itself off guard, as they were on ice practicing, and also had a recruit fly in today.

UND moved up to D-I in 2006, but the program didn’t really gain steam until 2010, when local standouts Monique and Jocelyne Lamoureux transferred to the program from Minnesota, and then led the team to the NCAA quarterfinals in their junior and senior seasons. Both sisters played on the 2014 US Olympic team; UND also sent six others to Sochi to play for the Finland and Germany national teams. According to the Grand Forks Herald, UND could send as many as ten players to the 2018 Games. Two current players, Emma Nuutinen and Anna Kilponen, are currently in Detroit with Team Finland for the International Ice Hockey Federation’s World Championship.

The decision comes one day after USA Hockey finally bent to the will of the U.S. women’s national team, who had threatened to boycott the IIHF Worlds after more than a year of bargaining over the disparity in financial support between the women’s and men’s teams, and developing women’s hockey in general. The two sides had been locked in a bitter fight, to the point where USA Hockey was looking to high school teams for scabs, but the players were eventually able to reach an acceptable deal with the organization. Unfortunately, when it comes to college sports, student athletes like Nuutinen and Kilponen don’t have the same leverage when the school can just erase their program from existence.