At this moment, Cornell is the best hockey school in the Ivy League.
It took the help of out-of-town results, but the men’s and women’s hockey programs — both ranked No. 11 in the nation — earned their respective 2025-2026 Ivy League championships this past weekend.
The pair of titles brings the total to 45 earned between the two programs, dating back to 1966. This year marks the eighth time both the men and women have won the championship in the same year.
The women’s program secured the title on Friday, the final weekend of the regular season. Cornell had just defeated St. Lawrence, 4-3 in overtime, before checking the Princeton-Yale score from its locker room in Canton, New York.
A 2-0 loss for Princeton clinched the program’s 18th — and third consecutive — Ivy League title.
“We needed some help here in the last week, but we did our part,” said women’s hockey head coach Doug Derraugh ’91. “I’m proud of the girls to be able to get the Ivy League Championship this year. It was a lot of teams that were competing for that and it was a real close run right until the end, and so for us to come out on top is huge.”
The men’s program took a slightly different path to its 27th Ivy League championship and first since 2024. Still with another Ivy game to play — at Princeton on Saturday — and two weeks left in the regular season, a bevy of clinching scenarios were at play this past weekend.
Neck-and-neck with Dartmouth, the Red needed the nationally-ranked Big Green to collect fewer than three points against middling Yale and Brown teams to secure the championship outright.
A Dartmouth shootout win over Yale on Feb. 13 (two points), coupled with Brown’s upset regulation win over the Big Green (zero points) the following night, clinched the title for Cornell on Feb. 14, despite the Red falling 4-1 to Union that same evening.
The championships for both the men and women are notable because of the Ivy League’s parity this season — since the COVID-19 pandemic, Ivy League programs have struggled to return to their former prominence, before the age of fifth-years and recruiting troubles.
Until this year. The Ivy League has four teams — on both the men’s and women’s sides — with winning records (above .500). The race to both crowns saw an unprecedented amount of competition, levels not seen since before the 2019-2020 NCAA season was cut short.
On the men’s side, the Ivy League has not seen more than two of its teams achieve winning records in a single season since 2018-2019 (three), and four Ivies have not been above .500 in one campaign since 2015-2016. This season — though there are still some games to play — looks to change that, as four squads (Cornell, No. 14 Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton) boast winning records heading into the final two weekends of play.
The numbers are eerily similar on the women’s side — the four Ivy League teams above .500 at this season’s conclusion (Cornell, No. 8 Yale, No. 9 Princeton, Brown) are the most since the 2019-2020 season.
It is the pursuit of the title — what it takes to get there — that makes the end result all that much more worth it.
“I don't think [the Ivy League] has just returned to form. I think it's taken another step from where it was,” men’s hockey head coach Casey Jones ’90 told The Sun earlier this season. “I think there are not only good teams, I think some of them are very good teams. That's the exciting part.”
Jane McNally is a senior editor on the 143rd editorial board and was the sports editor on the 142nd editorial board. She is a member of the Class of 2026 in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. You can follow her on X @JaneMcNally_ and reach her at jmcnally@cornellsun.com.
