A Guide to the NCAA Women's Hockey Post-Season

We're in the thick of the women's college hockey post-season, so let's make sure everyone understands how it works.

There are four conferences -- CHA, ECAC, Hockey East, and WCHA -- and each of them have a conference tournament. In the the CHA, the top two teams have a bye into the final weekend and the bottom four teams play the first weekend. In the WCHA, all eight teams make the tournament and play 1 vs 8, 2 vs 7, etc... In the ECAC and Hockey East, the top eight teams make the tournament and play the same format as the WCHA. All the conference tournaments take place over two weekends:

The first weekend features best-of-three series (these were last weekend) with the higher seeds hosting the games and getting home-ice advantage.
The following weekend, the winners of those games head to a pre-determined host location and play both a semifinal and final to decide the conference's tournament winner.

The winner of each conference tournament earns an auto-bid into the NCAA tournament.