Girls hockey mystery: Who ya gonna play?

“There are still some unanswered questions with what’s going to happen with the playoffs,” said Bob Johnson, associate executive director of the Vermont Principals’ Association, the governing body for high school athletics in the state.

That uncertainty stems from the fact that a new divisional alignment is being used in girls hockey for the first time. The 18 varsity teams left in the state have been split into three divisions, or tiers. Three different divisions are fairly standard in Vermont, but there are only six teams in each division for girls hockey, and six teams aren’t enough to hold a playoff tournament. So, rather than hold three division tournaments, the Vermont Principals’ Association is going to split Division 2 down the middle, sending some teams up to compete in the Division 1 playoffs while the other D-2 squads take on the six teams that played in Division 3 during the regular season.

Both the local cooperative teams, Harwood-Northfield and Peoples Academy-Stowe, are competing in Division 2 during the regular season, but where they’ll be playing playoff hockey, and who they’ll be playing against, is still unclear.

“We’re going to end up taking X number of schools into the D-1 tournament,” and the remainder will play for the Division 2 crown with the Division 3 teams, Johnson said.

Johnson and his staff decided to have three regular-season divisions but only two playoff after consulting girls hockey coaches across the state.

“It allows the Tier [Division] 2 and 3 teams to have a schedule where they can have some success, at least during the regular season,” said Sean Farrell, the athletic director at Middlebury who chairs the principal’s association hockey committee.

Declining enrollment in Vermont schools has reduced the number of athletes, and thus the number of girls hockey teams.

“I see at least two teams moving up” from Division 2 to the Division 1 playoffs, Farrell said, but he still doesn’t know which two. The initial plan was to take the teams with the best records and most success against the Division 1 teams on their schedules. That’s been hard to judge, though, because there’s been only one game in which a D-2 team beat a D-1: Middlebury’s 4-3 win over Rutland. PA-Stowe has the next best result, a 3-3 tie against Rutland. PA-Stowe has played well against other D-1 schools too, losing by just one goal four times, including a 2-1 setback to BFA St. Albans, ranked No. 1 in D-1.

“Right now Stowe and Middlebury are the top two teams in Tier 2,” Farrell said last Friday.

The story is a little murkier for Harwood-Northfield, which has been ranked third in Division 2 for much of the year but fell to fourth after a loss to PA-Stowe on Monday. The Highlanders played well against D-1 Rice and lost to BFA St. Albans by only 2-0, but lost 6-0 to second-place Essex and 6-1 to South Burlington.

“When we do the pairings, we will look at the success rate of the year, we won’t make a decision until we see how the Tier 2 teams did against Tier 1 teams,” Farrell said.

There will be eight teams in one tournament bracket and 10 in the other because the hockey committee opposes a nine-nine division split, which would require a play-in game in each division.

“Ideally we’d like to keep it at even numbers,” Farrell said.

Farrell’s committee will issue the playoff pairings Feb. 25.

Any play-in games for boys and girls hockey will be on March 1, quarterfinal matchups are March 4 and 5, and the state semifinals will be played March 8 and 9. The state title games for boys hockey will be on March 13 and the girls D-1 and D-2 championship games are March 14 at the University of Vermont’s Gutterson Fieldhouse.