With the winter sports seasons now underway, the NESCAC has earned the respect of coaches and the media in the national preseason and early-season rankings.
The conference garnered the most respect in the latest Div. III men's hockey poll, as four NESCAC teams find themselves listed among the top 15 teams in the nation.
Middlebury (4-0) solidified itself as the No. 1 team in the nation with wins over No. 10 SUNY-Plattsburgh and No. 15 Norwich over the weekend to win the PrimeLink Great Northern Shootout. Trinity, which defeated Conn. College in conference action on Sunday to move to 3-1, comes in at No. 9. No. 11 Bowdoin and No. 15 Colby, which picked up weekend wins against Salve Regina and Nichols in the Bowdoin-Colby Face-off Classic, moved to 3-1 and 4-0, respectively.
The Panther women's hockey team, also 4-0, remained the unanimous No. 1 team in the nation with a weekend two-game sweep of Hamilton. Bowdoin (2-1) is also in the national top ten, coming in this week at No. 8 despite a 2-1 loss to No. 5 Manhattanville on Saturday.
Off the ice and onto the court, the NESCAC has garnered attention in the rankings as well. Bowdoin's dominance of the NESCAC has been well-publicized, as the Polar Bears have earned the No. 3 preseason ranking from D3hoops.com. Wesleyan is also representing the conference at No. 17. The Polar Bears (3-0) headed into Thanksgiving with a win over New England College last Tuesday, while Wesleyan has had a slow start to the season at 1-2.
Perennial powerhouse Amherst, after a week of inactivity during the Thanksgiving holiday, is ranked fourth in the nation in men's basketball, behind only Illinois Wesleyan, Wooster and Wittenberg.
While the NESCAC men's and women's ice hockey schedules have already begun, conference teams do not meet in basketball until the Dec. 9. Until then, the polls are the best way to measure how teams might fare against one another, and the concentration of league teams among the nation's best means there will be heated competition ahead.
