"It’s a great leveler," says David Light, co-president of the club, who says nine in 10 club members had never held a hockey stick before coming to Wharton. "People spend the first couple of games falling all over the ice and running into each other."
Six of the top 10 business schools ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek have hockey clubs, according to their websites, including the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Harvard Business School, and the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.
At Wharton, Light and a group of about 13 students who help administer the league divided the club into eight different teams, who play each other in 14 games over the course of the academic year. Light says the club has grown quickly over the past decade and a half.
This April, as in years past, Wharton plans to host Yale and Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business in a semiofficial tournament—the "Cheesesteak Chalice." Wharton fielded five teams at the competition last year, but Yale will probably send fewer to Philadelphia. Its crew size dwindles around that time because people are crunching to land internships or jobs. "We naturally lose people on that front," Cohen says.