Bulldogs to visit Northern Ireland

NEW HAVEN — Highlights of the Yale men’s hockey schedule next season include a trip to Northern Ireland and getting reacquainted with an old friend.

The Bulldogs will participate in the annual Friendship Four during Thanksgiving weekend in Belfast. Now in its fourth season, the tournament includes two teams from ECAC Hockey and two from Hockey East. Yale plays Union on Nov. 23 — to be counted as a non-conference game — with UConn and Boston University squaring off in the second semifinal.

The championship and consolation games are Nov. 24. It marks the first time Yale has played in a foreign country since a four-game exhibition series in Vancouver and Edmonton in December 1999.

Red Gendron, an assistant coach under Keith Allain at Yale during the 2013 national championship season, is now in his sixth season as head coach at Maine. The two longtime friends will face each other on Jan. 7 when Yale plays Maine at Cross Insurance Arena in Portland, Maine.

In the days before Hockey East, Yale and Maine played each other regularly as members of the ECAC. But the distance between the schools, and Yale’s abbreviated non-conference schedule, makes things difficult.

The programs have played only twice in the last 30 years, in 1992 at the Great Alaska Faceoff in Fairbanks and in January 1999, a game also played in Portland. The Bulldogs last win over Maine was in February 1984.

Yale’s game in Maine is on a Monday night and comes two days after the Bulldogs play at New Hampshire, a Jan. 5 game in Durham. The teams played twice last season. New Hampshire took a 4-0 decision in New Haven with the Bulldogs gaining revenge with a 4-2 win at the Ledyard Bank Classic in Hanover, N.H.

The rest of the non-conference schedule includes UMass and UConn — meaning the Bulldogs will play five of their seven non-league games against Hockey East opponents — and a home date with Sacred Heart.

Yale, which has won its last four games against the Minutemen, travels to UMass on Dec. 11. UConn is at Ingalls Rink on New Year’s Eve, a 4 p.m. start. Yale is 11-0 all-time against

the Huskies.

Sacred Heart, also coached by a former Allain assistant in North Haven’s C.J. Marottolo, is here on Jan. 12. Yale leads the alltime series 5-1.

Other notes from the upcoming schedule:

Yale opens the season with three successive ECAC road games, Oct. 26 at Brown and a trip to Cornell and Colgate on Nov. 2-3. The home opener is on Nov. 9 against Harvard, with Dartmouth scheduled a night later.

There’s an exhibition game against the Chinese national team on Dec. 28 at Ingalls Rink.

And both games against Quinnipiac come late in the season — in Hamden on Feb. 8 and in New Haven in the regular season finale on March 2. Yale’s game at Harvard is on a Sunday night, Feb. 24, at 7, two days after playing at Dartmouth.