NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee State University introduced Wednesday that it's going to grow to be the primary Historically Black College and University (HBCU) to introduce ice hockey.

The program has been created in partnership with the National Hockey League, the National Hockey League Players Association and the Nashville Predators. The announcement was made on the date of the NHL draft, which can be held at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville – town the place TSU is positioned.

Since 2017, the NHL and the gamers affiliation have sponsored feasibility research to U.S. faculties and universities fascinated about exploring the addition of Division I males’s and ladies’s packages. TSU and the NHL started their research in 2021. It is unclear whether or not the varsity will add males’s ice hockey, girls’s ice hockey or each.

Tennessee State’s addition follows a development of HBCUs including sports outdoors their extra conventional choices of soccer, males’s and ladies’s basketball and males’s and ladies’s observe and subject. Earlier this 12 months, The Associated Press contacted 46 Division I and D-II HBCUs and 5 convention places of work in regards to the development. Twenty faculties responded, saying that they had added at the very least 42 NCAA championship or rising sports since 2016, together with at the very least 32 sports since 2020 alone.

In 2022-23 Fisk University turned the primary HBCU to supply girls’s gymnastics. Morgan State will grow to be the one HBCU providing Division I males’s wrestling this upcoming college 12 months.

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