The New England Intercollegiate Hockey League is a defunct NCAA Division I ice hockey-only conference.
The league was an early attempt by second-tier programs to form a conference and stabilize their schedules during the Great Depression.
[1] While the upper echelon of college hockey teams had been creating formal leagues for decades, many of the 'lesser' schools were frozen out of these conferences.
Because members weren't required to play one another, the better programs could ignore the lower clubs, creating an effective class system within the conference.
While the conference's demise was unfortunate, most of the league members would eventually help form ECAC Hockey in 1961, a 28-team super-conference.