In late April, the Skyline Conference announced that it would be adding its 11th full-time member as Sarah Lawrence College accepted an invitation to join the league based primarily in the New York City area. The school, located in Yonkers, N.Y., had previously competed in the Hudson Valley Men's and Women's Athletic Conferences and would change leagues following the 2013–14 season. Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference Earlham College became a member of the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference in 2010 after previously being a member of the North Coast Athletic Conference. Ice hockey Men's ice hockey Division I men's ice hockey traditionally maintained a structure of hockey-only conferences with no relationship to the other major, all-sports conferences. At the start of the realignment cycle, only 60 schools participated in men's ice hockey, with most concentrated in the Midwest, New York, and New England. However, the decision by Penn State to add varsity men's ice hockey starting in 2012, triggered by multibillionaire professional sports investor (and Penn State alumnus) Terry Pegula's financing of a new hockey arena for the university, triggered a series of changes in the conference alignment. Most significantly, the number of Big Ten universities with men's ice hockey programs reached six, the minimum number of teams required for the Big Ten to officially sponsor a sport, and more significantly the number needed by a conference to receive an automatic bid into the NCAA hockey tournament. Thus, the Big Ten member institutions voted to add men's ice hockey as a conference-sponsored sport beginning in 2013. The decision required the five existing men's ice hockey programs from Big Ten member schools to leave their current conferences – Minnesota and Wisconsin from the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, and Michigan, Michigan State, and Ohio State from the Central Collegiate Hockey Association. In response to the departures of those programs—with a total of 23 national championships among them—the members of the WCHA and CCHA feared a loss of national influence and conference strength. In an attempt to create a conference perceived as competitive with the Big Ten, five additional members of the WCHA, and one from the CCHA, decided to break away and form a new conference, the National Collegiate Hockey Conference (NCHC). The NCHC began play in the 2013–14 season. With the departures of Denver, North Dakota, Minnesota–Duluth, Nebraska-Omaha, and Colorado College, the WCHA would have been reduced to five members (from their then-current