Penn State’s athletic program has enjoyed a reasonable amount of success across most sports over the past several years, but few teams have been as successful as the women’s hockey team.

Four consecutive trips to the NCAA Tournament, four consecutive CHA/AHA conference regular-season and tournament titles, and a banner year in 2025-26, which culminated in a run to the Frozen Four and taking the eventual national champions to overtime in a heartbreaker at Pegula Ice Arena.

There’s a lot of returning talent, but the prevailing narrative entering the 2026-27 season is all the new faces trying to replace program legends who departed.

Last season’s team featured plenty of senior talent, all of whom have moved on to the PWHL, headlined by Olympic gold medalist Tessa Janecke, who was selected No. 3 overall by Las Vegas.

With that talent out the door, head coach Jeff Kampersal and his staff have been busy building a new roster that will hopefully build on the team’s prior success.

“Our returnees, it’s now going to be on them to bring the younger players along,” Kampersal said at AHA Media Day on Wednesday. “And as coaches, we’re going to have to dig deeper and work on habits and actually getting into the coaching part again.”

It’s a sharp reversal from last season, going from a team that played together for years to a group that’ll force younger players into leadership roles. After rostering eight seniors in 2025, only Vermont transfer Ashley Kokavec is listed as one this year. Just six of the 22 players on the roster have been with the program for more than one season.

With all the new faces (10, to be exact), Kampersal has admitted it will be a process of learning everybody’s personalities while gelling as a team.

“Every year is a challenge trying to fit pieces together,” Kampersal said. “It is a little different because a couple of the newcomers, there are two pairs that look very similar off the ice, so I got to do my best not to confuse them.”

Despite rostering seven freshmen, he believes the backgrounds of the incoming players will give them a head start in preparing for a more skillful, physical college game.

“A lot of the players that we have come from good programs, which is good,” Kampersal said. “They’re winners. They’re captains where they’ve been. Their teams have had the puck a lot. We got to work on the defensive side of things, angling, getting them to play and think differently, so it’ll be a challenge.”

It’s going to be a challenge all season long, particularly out-of-conference play. The Nittany Lions are currently scheduled to face three different teams that made the 2026 NCAA Tournament, including Ohio State, Minnesota, and Princeton.

Penn State is also set to face a talented Boston College team at D1 in DC on Black Friday and perennial ECAC contender Cornell in January.

Kampersal has long believed that challenging his team with high-level non-conference bouts sets them up for future success. He tries to schedule as many as possible, using them as learning experiences.

“We open up at Ohio State, so last year, our Ohio State series was probably the most physical women’s hockey series we’ve been involved in. It was basically full-on body checking and then some,” he said.

“We took some punishment and gave punishment, but it was really good for our players to know how the best are doing and how, if we want to beat them, we’ve got to try to emulate and surpass what they’re doing.”

What Penn State has done in the AHA has been nothing short of incredible, tearing through conference play and the conference tournament in four consecutive years. When preseason conference awards were announced, Penn State was not only picked to finish first for the fifth year in a row, but also had junior Grace Outwater named Preseason Player of the Year.

“Grace [Outwater] is an incredible athlete,” Kampersal said. “I think she’s learned by watching Tessa [Janecke] compete. She gets after it hard in the weight room, which contributes to her on-ice success. She’s got a bit of a nasty streak to her as well, so I think that helps.”

As the season-opening scrimmage against RIT at Pegula Ice Arena approaches, the burning question might just be in the net, an area that Penn State has boasted a tremendous advantage in recent years with Katie DeSa, who won two AHA Goaltender of the Year Awards in her four years at Penn State.

But with DeSa moving on to the PWHL, there’s an opening for the Nittany Lions, one that Kampersal has not yet determined who will fill it.

His plan going into the season is for sophomore Maddy Campbell, who had a terrific freshman year as DeSa’s backup. He’s also gravitated to freshman Morgan Stickney, a gold medalist for Team USA’s U18 team in 2026.

“The plan is to have them battle it out,” he said. “Whoever’s doing well after the RIT scrimmage will get the first start against Ohio State [on September 24], then we’ll literally take it practice by practice and game by game.”

There seems to be little doubt that the Nittany Lions will continue to reign over the AHA, but they’ve put themselves in a position to dream a lot bigger than a conference title.

If they want to reach the level of consistent dominance we’ve seen with Wisconsin and Minnesota, years like these will be crucial to establishing that culture of being a premier program.