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Penn State Women’s Hockey Misses Out on First NCAA Tournament Appearance

Penn State women’s hockey will have to wait another year for a program-first NCAA Tournament appearance after failing to earn an at-large bid from the selection committee on Sunday night.

The Nittany Lions finish the year at 16-3-2 following a season of conference-only play among CHA opponents. Penn State fell in its first game of the CHA tournament to Syracuse after falling in overtime the previous outing to Mercyhurst. Robert Morris would eventually win the conference tournament and earn an automatic bid as a result.

The NCAA Tournament is an eight team field made up of four teams that earn automatic bids through conference tournaments and four at-large bids.

Despite a historic season for the Nittany Lions, the CHA’s overall perception as the nation’s weakest conference, hurt Penn State’s resume at-large, in particular following two late season losses. In turn, Sunday’s news was not entirely a surprise, although no less disappointing for Penn State coach Jeff Kampersal.

“What is what is frustrating is just the lack of respect our league gets from an overall standpoint,” Kampersal said earlier in the year.

“There’s previous years where both Mercyhurst and Robert Morris have been two really strong teams where they potentially both could go [but only the automatic bid did]. This year it’s going to be interesting because there are no crossover [games between conferences] So perceptions will be based on last year like ‘Program X is really good. They’ve been really good for a long time so therefore they still must be good and still must be better than any CHA team.’ I’m sure they’re gonna pay attention to these Mercyhurst games coming up.”

And it would appear that they did. Nevertheless a regular season CHA Title banner will still hang from the rafters at Pegula Ice Arena, an accomplishment in its own right.

NCAA Tournament bracket