Ole Miss head coach Josh Herbert talks to his players in a game against MTSU on Feb. 7, 2025. Photo by Taylor Hill.

Club hockey teams at four SEC schools — Ole Miss, Georgia, Auburn and Alabama — are leaving their current league to form a SEC branch of the Atlantic Coast Conference Hockey League in the 2025-26 season.

All four teams are currently a part of College Hockey South (CHS). Originally, the league was called the South Eastern Collegiate Hockey Conference, but the name was changed after the league began to add non-SEC teams. The CHS has 50 teams from 30 schools across eight southeastern states.

Josh Herbert is the Ole Miss Ice Hockey Club’s coach.

“We felt that it (CHS) was getting too big too fast,” Herbert said. “(I) feel like this is the best move for Ole Miss hockey.”

Another big motivator for making this move is an increase in recruitment. In the past two years, Ole Miss has had a spike in players interested in club hockey. Due to the high number of players, they had to field a Division III team.

The Atlantic Coast Collegiate Hockey League (ACCHL) is unique in allowing teams to compete against opponents in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and participate in either the American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA) or AAU playoffs.

The ACHA is a legitimate and growing association that is more competitive than AAU hockey. Recently UNLV, a D1 ACHA team, upset Denver — the 2024 reigning NCAA D1 champions — on the road. Additionally, North Carolina and North Carolina State played an outdoor game in North Carolina, and 26,000 people attended. ESPN+ broadcasts all NC State hockey home games.

Herbert said that the ACCHL commissioner is onboard with SEC teams joining the conference, with the intention of breaking off to form their own league in the coming years.

“(The ACCHL commissioner) sees the value of the brand, and I don’t think it’s lost on anybody … that the SEC is a big brand,” Herbert said.

A timeline for when the teams will branch off into an SEC-only league has not been determined. In order to form an all-SEC league, eight teams are required to participate. Mississippi State is the only SEC school without a club hockey team.

Conversations about the new league have been going on since last summer. Max Mona, head coach of the Vanderbilt Club Hockey team, said that players have also been involved in the process.

“There’s been a lot of discussion around SEC, ACHA and other options,” Mona said. “We’ve given our players the flexibility to decide on leagues and scheduling.”