The Vanderbilt Commodores Ice Hockey Club will once again take the ice in 2016/17 with an eye towards winning its first ever SECHC championship crown. To achieve that goal, the club will have to navigate a schedule that includes a little bit of everything in terms of events, travel, and opponents, both new and old.
Check out the 2016/17 Season Schedule
The team will open both its season and SECHC campaign with a home match-up versus Mississippi State on Friday, September 16. The game will be paired with the team’s biannual alumni weekend, an event that will feature the likes of Jotham “Crazy Legs” McCauley and Justin “Steel Curtain” Seibert.
Vanderbilt will continue its thrust into league play versus South Carolina before hosting its annual College Hockey SCHOLAR SHOOTOUT, an event that features teams from the nation’s academic top-50 rankings each season. This year, the club will play host to Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, and Northwestern. Each team will be vying for the right to take home the Keith Davis Memorial Trophy – a.k.a. “The Davey,” a giant pencil that honors both the celebration of the student-athlete paradigm that the tournament celebrates, as well as one of the founders of the program who lived out the values of the event both on and off the ice.
The semester will be rounded out with first ever trips to South Bend, Indiana, to play Notre Dame just prior to Thanksgiving, then to Athens, Georgia, to play SECHC rival UGA. Mark Sunday, December 4th, on your calendars folks, as Vanderbilt’s meeting with the Ice Dawgs will no doubt be a hotly contested battle between two of the top teams from the 2015/16 campaign. (Georgia claimed the SECHC title in Nashville, beating Vandy en route to the championship, while the Commodores vanquished the Dawgs just two weeks later at the Regional Tournament in Orlando. This year’s contest should be a fantastic match-up.)
The spring semester will kick off with games versus SECHC rival Tennessee, always spirited, before concluding with first ever tilts against Marquette, then the SECHC tournament.
Coming off of a banner year that tested the program in more ways that you can imagine, the Commodores are excited to once again lace up and hit the ice in 2016/17. We’ll be checking in with news and notes about the roster ahead of our season kickoff. In the meantime, thanks for your continued support of the program, as well as for coming out to the rink this fall.
Anchor down, and GO DORES!