After five years of study, the University of Illinois is dropping plans to establish a men’s varsity hockey team.
The school began looking at the possibility of creating a team that could compete in the NCAA back in 2017. But officials have concluded that it’s not possible right now to create the kind of financing and funding plan to make the team viable.
Creating a hockey team would have required construction of a new multi-purpose arena, and school officials say the estimated cost of such a project skyrocketed during and after the pandemic.
