Fresh off a 26-win season, the Rams head to St. Louis as the No. 22 seed to battle Calvin University on March 12 in the opening round of the American Collegiate Hockey Association Division I National Championships

KINGSTON, R.I. – March 5, 2026 – The University of Rhode Island men’s club hockey team is heading to the national championship tournament for the first time in more than a decade looking to build off a late-season run that helped it punch its ticket to St. Louis.

Following a 26-9-1 finish in 2025–26 and a regular season Eastern Collegiate Hockey Association championship, the Rams are seeded 22nd out of 24 teams in this year’s American Collegiate Hockey Association Division I National Championships and begin tournament play Thursday, March 12 at 1:30 p.m. against No. 11 seed Calvin University.

The Rams’ last trip to the ACHA tournament was in 2014–15 when they finished with 30 wins and earned the No. 12 seed before losing to Stony Brook in the opening round. This season also marks the 20-year anniversary of URI’s first and only national championship in 2005–06. All URI’s success over the past three and a half decades has come under the guidance of head coach Joe Augustine, the university’s winningest coach at the club or varsity level and a two-time ACHA Men’s Division I Coach of The Year winner.

URI enters this year’s tournament with wins in 12 of its last 13 games with the lone loss coming this past Sunday in the ECHA Tournament semifinals against Drexel University. Senior defenseman Tim Crane said the Rams need to wipe the slate clean and put the loss in the rear-view mirror before heading to St. Louis next week for their matchup against the Knights.

The team heads west next Tuesday and is currently fundraising to cover travel expenses. All games are available to stream live with a subscription to FloHockey, a premier digital streaming platform.

“We’re still recovering, at least mentally, from losing in the semifinals of our division tournament, but everyone is excited to go to St. Louis,” Crane said. “The vibe is pretty high in our locker room right now.”

URI’s 2025–26 included a 16-3 record in league play led by All-ECHA selections Cameron Cyr (Exeter, R.I.), Nick Maringola (Cheshire, Conn.), and Zach Gold (Glen Ridge, N.J.). Cyr, a sophomore forward and the team’s leading goal scorer with 25 in 36 games, earned First Team honors while Maringola, a senior goaltender, and Gold, a sophomore defenseman, earned Second Team honors.

Cyr combined with senior forward Shane Mulhern (Middletown, R.I.) to score 86 points and each ranked among the top 50 scorers in the nation with 42 and 44 points, respectively. Maringola won 13 games in 22 appearances with two shutouts and a 2.36 goals against average.

Numbers aside, Crane and Augustine point to the team’s chemistry as a major factor in this year’s success. A wave of early-season departures brought the remaining players closer together, and the group responded quickly out of the gate with wins in seven of its first eight games in the fall.

“We have a really tight-knit group,” Crane said. “We rallied around one another where the only thing that mattered was the guys in the locker room.”

“The hardest part about a locker room,” Augustine said, “is that we can coach the guys on the ice and we can try to implement systems and so forth, but that chemistry in the room is all on them. Coaches do not control locker rooms. I believe a lot in the chemistry aspect of a team, and there were probably things in there that were affecting our chemistry, but from what we’ve seen and what the players tell me, it’s a lot better now.”

The 2025–26 season was also highlighted by URI’s return to the ECHA after spending 18 seasons in the now dissolved Eastern States Collegiate Hockey League following the departure of Delaware, Stony Brook, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh to the newly-formed Atlantic Coast Collegiate Hockey League. The two remaining teams, URI and Drexel, rejoined the ECHA, where URI competed when Augustine took over the head coaching position in 1989.

“I know the league because I’ve been in it before, but it was an adjustment for sure,” Augustine said.

Asked what he knows about next week’s opponent, Calvin, Augustine said, “not a whole lot.” The Rams abide by the philosophy of playing their brand of hockey regardless of the opponent’s approach. Calvin finished the season ranked 11th in the nation with a 20-8-2 record and enters the ACHA tournament following a loss to league rival Adrian in the Great Lakes Six Hockey Conference championship game.

“They’re very, very deep,” Augustine said. “We’ll prepare our players as best we can, but until they get there and experience it for themselves, it’ll be a big adjustment for them.

“I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum. I was there when we went into the [2005–06] tournament ranked No. 1 in the country. You never know what will happen, but if you don’t bring your ‘A’ game, even if you’re the No. 1 team in the country, you’ll have problems. We’re going to have to make adjustments and come up with a way to slow them down. We’re not a team that’s going to run-and-gun with people. We need to play our game and slow things down, and if we can do that and survive the first seven or eight minutes, I think we’ll settle down and play.”

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Michael Parente, director of communications and marketing in the URI Division of Student Affairs, wrote this news release.