Early years (1999–2003) The first women's teams at URI, typical of a new program, lost more games than they won, posting a 6–33–1 mark from the inaugural 1999–2000 season through 2001–02. For the team's first four years, it primarily used the West Warwick Ice Rink in
West Warwick, Rhode Island - roughly a half hour drive from campus - as its home facility. Early schedules featured a mix of top club programs of the day, as well as junior varsity teams from
NCAA Division I schools and
NCAA Division III teams. Rhode Island's 2000–01 schedule, for example, included future ECWHL opponents
Boston University, Massachusetts and
Penn State from the first category, alongside the JV team from
Brown and DIII's
Salve Regina. The Rams' sole victory that year came against the Providence Lady Reds program. In the 2001–02 season, URI became a member of the ACHA Women's Division (later ACHA Women's Division 1) in its second year of existence, as the organization provided much-needed structure, regulation and a national championship tournament for non-varsity women's college hockey. The Rams' 5–12–0 record in 2001–02 merited a final ranking of fourth in the East Region (at the time, the ACHA was split into three regions, with the top two from each receiving national tournament bids, along with two wild card selections). An improved team in 2002–03 achieved its first winning mark at 10–7–3, boosting the program to a near-miss for the ACHA National Tournament at third in the East Region. The Rams' stars in their formative years included Marina Riva and Lauren Marx, each of whom ranked among the top ten nationally in 2002–03 scoring. Marina Riva won the leading scorer award for the team in the 2002–03 season with 20 goals and 15 assists for a total of 35 points. Forward Heather Scherick became the first in URI's long line of ACHA award winners by earning All-American Honorable Mention that season. The $12 million, 2,500-seat
Bradford R. Boss Arena, which finally gave the Rams a top on-campus facility and would prove instrumental to the program's growth in the years that followed, opened in the fall of 2002.
Exploding on the scene (2003–2004) Although the Rams showed steady improvement over their first four years, there really wasn't much indication of what would follow in season five: an immediate and decisive ascension into one of the nation's best programs, a status that continues to the present day. Coinciding with this development was the advent of the ECWHL thanks to the efforts of McCann, who also served as the league's first commissioner.
Buffalo, Penn State, Massachusetts and Boston University stood as URI's conference rivals in 2003–04. Rhode Island served notice of the shift immediately, taking 15 of the first 16 games on the schedule. Notable among the results were a 4–2 win over NCAA Division I
Sacred Heart on October 26, 2003, behind Robin Rosselle, who scored twice and assisted on the other two Rhody tallies. Win 15 of that opening salvo came on January 9, 2004, by a 4–3 score against defending national champion Michigan State. The next week, URI finished second at the UMass White Out Tournament, an invitational packed with powerhouses like the hosting Minutewomen,
West Los Angeles College,
Colorado and
Robert Morris (IL), before thoroughly dominating the schedule's home stretch. Against Buffalo, Penn State,
Bates College, UMass and
Saint Anselm, the Rams went 9–0–0 and scored 50 times while only surrendering 11 goals. A 2–2 draw with NCAA Division III
Holy Cross closed out the regular season. Driving the team's success were a bevy of top players, some familiar, some new. Riva, Marx and Scherick were all still around, as was Jen Wallace, already well on her way to putting together one of the most spectacular careers in team history by that point. Rosselle headlined a stellar group of freshman that also included Alysa Coleman, Karen Hawes and Lynn Pecci, who would become a mainstay in the Rams' crease during the middle part of the decade. Wallace (33 goals, 26 assists) and Hawes (20 goals, 27 assists) finished first and second in the national scoring race, while Scherick, Rosselle, Riva and Marx also placed highly on the list. In the first-ever ECWHL playoffs, hosted at Boss Arena, Rhody was just as dominant as during its 8–0–0 league regular season, dispatching BU (7–2) and UMass (9–2) to win the title and lock down the national number three ranking into the ACHA National Tournament. Things started well in
East Lansing, MI as URI took first in its pool and made the semifinals with decisive wins over West LA and
Iowa State, before taking down MSU for the second time in 2003–04 during the final four round. The dream season - which resulted in a program-best 32 wins - came to a disappointing end one victory shy however, as Wisconsin topped the Rams 3–1 in the ACHA championship clash.
A dynasty without a title (2004–2008) The spectacular 2003–04 season was hardly a one-off affair as URI recharged with another great incoming class, headlined by Pagliarini and goaltender Kelly Jourdain, while retaining most of its core. A steady flow of other program legends like Kate Garcia (2005–09), Jolene Rambone (2006–10), Justine Ducie (2007–11) and Meghan Birnie (2008-12) arriving in subsequent seasons ensured that the Rams remained in constant contention.
Helsinki, Finland native Johanna Leskinen (2008–12) was also part of that progression, and would go on to become the program's all-time leading scorer with 116 goals and 188 points in 112 games. Appropriately, given the caliber of players wearing Keaney blue, the Rams won every single regular season and playoff title for the first five years of the ECWHL's existence and cemented their status as the northeast's dominant team by taking the top spot in the East or Northeast Region (as applicable) in 24 of the 27 regional rankings issued between 2003–04 and 2009–10, after which the regional poll was discontinued. Rhody's success translated on a national scale as well, as McCann collected a pair of ACHA coach of the year awards in 2004–05 and 2007–08. Both came during a stretch that saw her team qualify for the ACHA semifinals in five consecutive seasons, from the runner-up finish of 2003–04 through 2007–08, when defending national champion Robert Morris (IL) took out the Rams in the final four round. The latter result was part of a disheartening trend: while Rhode Island was great, it just couldn't manage to scale two of the other dominant programs of the time.
Lindenwood, which beat URI in the 2007 semifinals, won the 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2010 national titles while RMU, which knocked URI out of nationals in 2005, 2006 and 2008 were the champs in 2005 and 2007 (the Lions and Eagles, in fact, went head to head in the title game to end four straight seasons, from 2006 through 2009). The Rams' run in the 2006 tournament was among the team's closest calls since the 2004 title game, as Chelsea Skorupski and Emily Tuohey put Rhode Island up 2–0 on RMU in the semis before a natural hat trick from 2006–07 Zoë M. Harris Award winner Savannah Varner flipped the result to 3–2 for the Eagles. In 2007–08, URI had another of the program's best seasons, as the Rams tore through their ACHA regular season schedule unbeaten at 19–0–2 (part of a 19–5–3 overall regular season mark that also included six contests against NCAA teams). Included in that run, most impressively, was a 4–1 win against Lindenwood at Boss Arena on November 16, 2007, behind two points from Emily Gasper and goals by Ducie and Pagliarini. Three months later, Ducie would strike again - in triple overtime against UMass - to give Rhody a fifth consecutive ECWHL tournament title on February 24, 2008. NU added insult to injury the next season by claiming the ACHA national championship that had long eluded the Rams in just its second Division I campaign. Despite the heightened competition within the league, URI more than held their own by winning four playoff and two regular season ECWHL titles over six years from 2008–09 through 2013–14, a combined total doubling that of UMass, the next highest team. All the while, the Rams continued running off ACHA National Tournament appearances, compiling a streak of 11 consecutive bids through 2013–14 - a number that has only been surpassed in ACHA history by UMass (14, 2005–18) and Michigan State (13, 2002–14). The national title-related frustration continued as well though, as Rhode Island continued to run into teams of destiny at the tourney. In 2009–10, the Lindenwood dynasty again presented a wall too high in the semifinals, while ascending Northeastern posed the same problem the following year and 2012–13 champion Minnesota blocked URI in the pool stage that time around. Following disappointingly short ACHA tournament runs in the springs of 2012 and 2013, McCann assembled one of her strongest teams in 2013–14. That squad featured a Zoë M. Harris Player of the Year Award winner (Cassie Catlow in 2012–13), four players picked for
World University Games teams (Catlow in both 2013 and 2015, Alisha DiFilippo in 2013, Lauren Hillberg in 2013 and Kristen Levesque in 2015) and six players who would be picked as first or second team All-Americans at some point during their careers (Catlow, DiFilippo, Hillberg, Brenna Callahan, Sydney Collins and Kayla DiLorenzo). With the talent cupboards again fully loaded, the Rams took both ECWHL championships for the first time since 2009–10 by shutting out both Vermont and UMass in the playoffs. URI carried the third seed to the ACHA National Tournament in
Newark, Delaware, and went unbeaten in the pool round (including a tie with eventual national champion
Miami), qualifying for the semifinals for the first time in three years. However, the Minutewomen exacted revenge for the ECWHL title and ousted Rhody there by a 2–1 score.
Tumult and resurgence (2014–present) McCann, by 2014 ACHA's longest-tenured coach by a wide margin, surprisingly did not have her contract renewed by the team that summer, which ended her 15-year run with a 304–128–26 overall record. In McCann's place stepped one of her former star players, 2009 graduate Pagliarini, who had been coaching the Cranston Thunderbirds (a high school co-op team combining players from
Cranston High School East,
Cranston High School West and
East Greenwich High School). The 2014–15 season started well, with the Rams moving into the ACHA's top five and highlighted by a 4–3 come-from-behind overtime win at second-ranked
Liberty, which gave the eventual national champion Flames their first loss. Just two days after the big win, however, a coach-player disagreement at practice resulted in All-American goaltender DiLorenzo being kicked off the team, while two other players also left the squad during the season. Thanks largely to the four goals per game average those players helped produce, URI returned to national prominence with an eighth ECWHL regular season championship and a 12th bid to the ACHA National Tournament. The following season, 2016–17, despite breakout years from Monica Darby (43 points, good for third in the nation) and rookie Madison Balutowski (28 goals, also third), URI narrowly missed nationals for the second time in three years.
Rumors of NCAA status The continued national success of the Rams, along with
URI's men's team and Rhode Island's status as the only New England state without NCAA Division I hockey at its
flagship university, has led to frequent rumors of the school adding men's and women's hockey as varsity sports. Most of these began with the completion of
Boss Arena, a facility considered capable of hosting NCAA hockey, in 2002, an occasion that led to then-athletic director Ron Petro to openly research the concept. Petro told college hockey news site
USCHO that "During [the last academic] year, the president [of URI] asked for a survey, so I talked to people from Hockey East, the ECAC and the MAAC as to URI - if we were able to fund it - getting into a league. I made a recommendation to the president in April, but we've been hit with budget cuts as most people have been, so we've delayed any decision on that until we can get a better hold on how to finance a Division I hockey program for men and women, which we know would be way over a million dollars. We are the only state university in New England that doesn't support a team. That would be a goal of mine in the future, but it all comes down to funding." More recently, a wave of conference realignment in NCAA hockey between 2012 and 2014 led to DI men's league
Atlantic Hockey maintaining a less-than-ideal odd number of members, 11. Rhode Island's men were involved in discussions to join Atlantic Hockey, with the women possibly receiving varsity status as well by joining AHC's sister league,
College Hockey America. However, in September 2014, athletic director Thorr Bjorn torpedoed things by flatly stating that the school "isn't currently looking at adding varsity hockey to our slate of offered sports." Nevertheless, Rhode Island is frequently mentioned by fans and writers as a candidate for NCAA expansion on a more informal basis. ==Season-by-season results==