Insights September 09, 2026

ISL Hockey: All 16 Independent School League Schools, Mapped

By Coach Scott

Somewhere in the 14U years, the conversation in the stands changes. It stops being about which division your club landed in and starts being about ninth grade. Public high school, stay in club, or apply to prep. And the moment someone says “prep,” the next three names out of their mouth are almost always ISL schools.

This is the page for that conversation. Sixteen schools, where they are, which division they play in, and what the league is actually for.

If you got here from the E9 or EHF guides, the short version of the connection is at the bottom, and it is more concrete than most people expect.

What this is. An organization guide to the 16 ISL member schools and their hockey programs, current as of 2026-09-09. Records and postseason results are from the completed 2025-26 season. Division alignment and enrollment figures come from the league and the sources listed at the end.

The ISL in 60 Seconds

The Independent School League is an athletic conference of 16 private college-preparatory schools, almost all of them in eastern Massachusetts, plus one in Rhode Island. It was founded in 1948 as the Private School League and took its current name in 1974.^†

Three facts matter more than anything else on this page, and most parents learn them late.

1. The ISL is a school league, not a hockey league. Member schools compete against each other in roughly 25 sports. Hockey is one of them. That sounds obvious until you realize what follows from it: your son or daughter is applying to a school, being admitted by an admissions office, and playing hockey as a student.

2. No postgraduates. ISL schools do not allow PG students to compete, and many member schools do not run a postgraduate year at all.^† This is the single biggest structural difference between the ISL and the rest of New England prep hockey, and it changes the age of the team your kid would be playing against. Elsewhere in NEPSAC, a roster can carry postgraduates who are a year older than the oldest senior on the ice.

3. Financial aid is need-based only. ISL rules commit member schools to awarding aid strictly on demonstrated financial need, with no athletic or academic scholarships.^† If someone tells you a school is offering money because of hockey, that is not how this league works.

All 16 schools field boys varsity hockey. Thirteen field girls varsity hockey (the three all-boys schools, Belmont Hill, Roxbury Latin, and St. Sebastian’s, obviously do not).^†

The Map

Sixteen campuses. Use the toggle to separate the two boys hockey divisions. Click a marker for the town, division, and what kind of school it is.

Important note: Markers are campus locations. A few schools skate at rinks a short drive from campus, and Groton School and Lawrence Academy sit close enough together in Groton that their markers nearly overlap.

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Keller vs Eberhart: What the Two Divisions Mean

The ISL splits boys hockey (and football) into two divisions. Keller is the larger-school group, Eberhart the smaller one, and the split runs roughly on total boys enrollment.^†

Here is the part that trips everybody up: the division names are about school size, not strength. In 2026, an Eberhart team was the No. 2 seed in New England’s top bracket and played for the championship, while two Keller teams went out in the quarterfinals of that same bracket and another Keller team was seeded into the second-tier bracket. Read the division as a scheduling group, not a ranking.

Keller Division

School	Town	Type	HS Enrollment	Head Coach (2025-26)
Belmont Hill School	Belmont, MA	Day, boys only	471	Brian Phinney
The Governor’s Academy	Byfield, MA	Boarding, coed	405	Brian McGuirk
Lawrence Academy	Groton, MA	Boarding, coed	424	Robbie Barker
Milton Academy	Milton, MA	Boarding, coed	471	Jim Gaudet
Noble and Greenough School	Dedham, MA	Day-primary, coed	518	Dan McGoff
St. Sebastian’s School	Needham, MA	Day, boys only	380	Sean McCann
Tabor Academy	Marion, MA	Boarding, coed	507	Gerald Dineen
Thayer Academy	Braintree, MA	Day, coed	496	David Hymovitz

Eberhart Division

School	Town	Type	HS Enrollment	Head Coach (2025-26)
Buckingham Browne & Nichols	Cambridge, MA	Day, coed	525	Cason Hohmann
Brooks School	North Andover, MA	Boarding, coed	353	Dave Ries
Groton School	Groton, MA	Boarding, coed	351	Bill Riley
Middlesex School	Concord, MA	Boarding, coed	402	Eddie Pavlini
The Rivers School	Weston, MA	Day, coed	382	Freddy Meyer
The Roxbury Latin School	West Roxbury, MA	Day, boys only	219	David Cataruzolo
St. George’s School	Middletown, RI	Boarding, coed	380	Allie Skelley
St. Mark’s School	Southborough, MA	Boarding, coed	380	Carl Corazzini

Enrollment figures, day/boarding classification and division alignment come from the league’s published membership data; coaches are as listed in New England Hockey Journal’s preseason division breakdowns.^† One thing that classification hides: “boarding” means the school runs a boarding program, not that everybody boards. Several of these schools enroll a large day population alongside it, and a few of the boarding schools are the easiest commutes on the list.

How ISL Hockey Fits Into NEPSAC

The ISL is one conference inside NEPSAC, the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council, which is what runs the actual championships. Your ISL team’s season ends in a NEPSAC bracket, not an ISL one.

NEPSAC sorts boys hockey into three postseason tournaments, each an eight-team field:

Tournament	Also called	What it is
Stuart/Corkery	Elite 8	The open bracket. The best eight teams in New England prep, regardless of school size.
Martin/Earl	Large School	The large-school bracket for teams not pulled into the Elite 8.
Piatelli/Simmons	Small School	The small-school bracket.

NEPSAC classifies by student body size, and the ISL classifies by boys enrollment, so the two do not line up cleanly. That is not a bug anyone is fixing. It is just something to know before you assume a division tells you a level.^†

What that looked like in 2026

Seven of the 16 ISL schools reached a NEPSAC boys bracket in March 2026, and they were spread across all three of them.^†

School	ISL Division	Bracket	Seed	How it ended
St. Mark’s	Eberhart	Elite 8	2 (24-3-0)	Beat Belmont Hill 7-2, beat Kimball Union 7-3, lost the final 4-2 to Avon Old Farms
St. Sebastian’s	Keller	Elite 8	4 (19-7-0)	Lost the quarterfinal 3-0 to Hotchkiss
Belmont Hill	Keller	Elite 8	7	Lost the quarterfinal 7-2 to St. Mark’s
Tabor	Keller	Large School	1 (19-7-0)	Beat Choate 2-1, lost the semifinal 5-4 in overtime to Brunswick
Thayer	Keller	Large School	5	Lost the quarterfinal 2-1 to Brunswick
Rivers	Eberhart	Small School	4 (13-8-3)	Lost the quarterfinal 5-0 to Berkshire
St. George’s	Eberhart	Small School	6	Lost the quarterfinal 4-1 to Canterbury

Look at that table again with the division column in mind. Eberhart, the “small school” division, produced the Elite 8 runner-up. Keller, the “large school” division, had its best team outside the Elite 8 seeded into the second-tier bracket. Go back to the 2023 championships and it inverts: Keller’s Lawrence Academy and Governor’s played in the Small School bracket that year, alongside Eberhart’s St. Mark’s and Brooks.^†

The ISL division your kid’s team plays in tells you who they play, not how good they are.

The Girls Side

Thirteen ISL schools field girls varsity hockey, and unlike the boys, there is no Keller/Eberhart split. It is one division.^†

Brooks, BB&N, Governor’s, Groton, Lawrence, Middlesex, Milton, Nobles, Rivers, St. George’s, St. Mark’s, Tabor, and Thayer.

It also does not get the attention it deserves relative to its results. In 2025-26, Nobles went 27-1-0 and took the No. 1 seed in the girls Elite 8 (the Chuck Vernon tournament), losing 5-4 in overtime in the semifinals to eventual champion Loomis Chaffee. Tabor, seeded seventh, knocked off No. 2 Phillips Andover 2-1 in overtime in the quarterfinals before losing its own semifinal 3-2. Two ISL schools in the last four of New England’s top girls bracket.^†

The girls calendar also has its own marquee holiday event, and it shares both a weekend and a pair of hosts with the boys one. Nobles and Milton co-host the boys Flood-Marr, which started in 1965, and the girls Harrington Invitational, which started in 1972. Each runs eight schools through a four-game December format.^† If you want to see a lot of prep hockey in one weekend without buying a season’s worth of tickets, that is the weekend.

What ISL Hockey Has Produced

Two data points that say more than a list of college commitments would.

Thayer Academy has two Hobey Baker Award winners. Mike Mottau ‘96 won it at Boston College in 2000, and Adam Gaudette, a Braintree native, won it at Northeastern in 2018 after leading all of NCAA Division I with 30 goals and 60 points.^† One school, two national player-of-the-year awards.

Alex Carpenter came out of Governor’s Academy. She won the 2015 Patty Kazmaier Award at Boston College and has gone on to multiple US Olympic teams and the PWHL.^†

And the coaching bench is deeper than most public high school leagues can offer. Rivers is coached by Freddy Meyer, who captained Boston University and played 281 NHL games. St. Mark’s is coached by Carl Corazzini, another BU captain who played for the Bruins and Blackhawks, and who won an Eberhart title and a NEPSAC Small School title in his first year on the job.^†

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How the ISL Connects to the E9 and the EHF

This is the part I actually wanted to write, because it almost never gets laid out anywhere, and it is the reason a club family should care about this page at all.

The timing is not a coincidence

Look at the ages. The E9’s oldest boys group is 14U. There is no 15U, no 16U, no 18U. Every one of the league’s boys divisions sits at 14U or younger, and for most players 14U is the ninth grade year. The league runs out of room at almost exactly the point prep school starts.

So the E9 does not compete with prep for players. It hands them off. And the handoff happens a year before the hockey makes it obvious, because the application goes in during eighth grade while your kid is still skating 13U in the same league. That is why the tryout conversation and the admissions conversation collide every winter, and why families feel blindsided by a school calendar running a full year ahead of the hockey one.

The EHF is different, and this is worth knowing before you assume the two leagues present the same choice. The EHF keeps going past 14U, fielding 15U, 16U and 18U groups straight through the high school years.^† That makes prep a genuine either/or for an EHF family, because prep hockey is a winter school sport and a player cannot do both.

The pipeline has names on it

In April 2025, three Rivers School freshmen, Carter Meyer, Finn Sears, and Sam Pandolfo, were selected to the USA Hockey National Team Development Program U-17 team. The school’s own account of it notes that the three “have been nearly inseparable since they were eight years old, first skating with the Boston Junior Eagles” before ending up on the same line at Rivers.^†

The Boston Jr Eagles are an EHF organization based in Brighton. They are on our EHF map, where they carried the highest average MyHockeyRankings rating of any Massachusetts EHF organization in the 2025-26 data we pulled. Three kids from one EHF club, to one ISL school, to the national program, in a single class.

That is one class at one school, not a study. But it is exactly the shape of the pipeline, and it is the shape nobody draws for you at a 14U tryout.

Sometimes it is the same building

The clearest overlap is physical. The Governor’s Academy plays at Whiston-Bragdon Arena in Byfield, and rentals for that arena are handled by Top Gun Arena.^† Top Gun is an EHF club, and it sits at Byfield on our EHF map, because that is where it is based.

An ISL school and an EHF organization, sharing one sheet of ice. If you overlay the ISL map above on the E9 and EHF maps, this stops looking like a coincidence: the same eastern Massachusetts corridor, the same towns, and in a few cases the same rinks.

What that means for your decision

Three honest observations, none of which will make the decision for you.

The ISL is a school choice with a hockey program attached, not a hockey choice with a school attached. Admissions decides. Financial aid is need-based only. If the academic fit is wrong, the hockey will not fix it.

The no-PG rule is a real competitive variable. It cuts both ways. Your kid will not be playing against 19-year-olds inside the league, and your kid also will not have the option of a repeat year to grow into. Weigh it deliberately.

Junior hockey is still the standard route to college hockey, prep or not. That is not my read, it is what Coach Greg Capello told us directly in our high school hockey webinar: junior hockey is now the standard path, even for prep school players. Prep is a genuinely good four years. It is not a shortcut past the four years of D1 hockey that might be your goal.

Where to Follow the Season

Placement and membership stay put. Standings do not. Bookmark the live sources rather than trusting a copied table:

ISL boys ice hockey and ISL girls ice hockey on the league’s own site, for schedules and division standings.
U.S. Hockey Report for New England prep standings, rankings and box scores, broken out by league including ISL Keller and ISL Eberhart. Much of it is subscriber-only.
New England Hockey Journal for previews, brackets and results. Also largely subscriber-only, and the best writing on this level of hockey anywhere.
NEPSAC for the postseason brackets themselves.

Make the Four Years Count

Whichever way this decision goes, the hockey part is the same problem it always was. Thirty-odd games happen, and by spring almost none of them are still in anybody’s head.

Prep programs come with real coaching staffs and real facilities. Most club and public high school teams are running on volunteers and a phone in the stands. That gap is not about talent. It is about whether anybody kept the film and did anything with it.

That is what we built Scout Elite for: coaches and parents turning game video into development in minutes, without a video staff.