The UNC Wilmington hockey team has released their schedule for the upcoming 2018-19 season.

The upcoming season for the club hockey team will be the team’s first ever season in Division II, after the team was accepted as a member of the Atlantic Coast Collegiate Hockey League back in March.

Following a 15-2-1 season and a regional win against the University of Florida in the regional tournament, the Seahawks are set to begin their new season on Sept. 7 against Wake Forest at the Wilmington Ice House. The game is scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. which is earlier than start times in previous seasons. This is because the following day on Sept. 8, the team will travel to Richmond, Virginia to play the University of Richmond.

“We are looking to play at a different level of competition and I wanted to get a true taste of that both inside the ACC and outside of it,” said assistant head coach Peter Gilinson, who is taking on a new role this season as the director of hockey operations for the team.

On the weekends of Sept. 14 and Sept. 28, the Seahawks will host two home games each weekend against Coastal Carolina and College of Charleston. The team will then prepare to participate in the Stephen Russell Memorial Tournament in Raleigh the weekend of Oct. 5.

The Stephen Russell Memorial Tournament is a tournament to honor the life of NC State goaltender Stephen Russell, who drowned in Jordan Lake back on the Fourth of July in 2009. In that tournament, the Seahawks will play Virginia Tech, George Washington and West Virginia.

Between Oct. 19 and Nov. 17, the Seahawks will play a total of seven games and six of those games will be on the road. The lone home game will be played on Oct. 20 against Duke. This will be a quick turnaround, as the night beforehand on Oct. 19, the Seahawks will play North Carolina State in Raleigh with a time for that game to be determined.

The lack of home games on the schedule can be credited to the team getting off to a late start in terms of planning out the new schedule and only a certain number of dates being available according to Coach Gilinson.

After the break between the fall and spring semester ends, the Seahawks will host two home games against UNC on Jan. 18 at 10 p.m. and NC State on Jan. 19 at 4:30 p.m. This will be the team’s final two home games of the season.

In February, the Seahawks will travel to UNC Charlotte on Feb. 2 and to Duke on Feb. 8 to close their regular season schedule. The ACCHL Tournament will be held in Winston-Salem from Feb. 15 to the 17.

“I wanted us to have a chance to show who and what UNCW hockey is all about and by mixing and matching some of the ACC teams with some of the teams outside of Division Two, it will give us a very representative schedule of that for this season,” said Coach Gilinson on what his intended goal was when it came to putting this schedule together.