The National Collegiate Hockey Conference (NCHC) is an NCAA men's Division I hockey conference for teams in the Midwestern United States. The league was formed on July 9, 2011 and began playing for the 2013–14 season, the same season that the Big Ten Conference began competition, as a combination of six previous members of the WCHA and two of the CCHA. The league is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) is a public university in Duluth, Minnesota. It is part of the University of Minnesota system and offers 17 bachelor's degrees in 87 majors, graduate programs in 24 different fields, and a two-year program at the School of Medicine and a four-year College of Pharmacy program.