Playoff Scores by Year

The State Catholic Tournament was held from 1965 through 1969. The top six teams from the Central Catholic Conference made the field. Duluth Cathedral and Crookston Cathedral were automatically entered. Duluth Cathedral was the champion all five years.

The Catholic Tournament was replaced by the State Independent Tournament which also ran five years. Initially, the eight team field included four schools from the CCC, two from the MISL, plus Duluth Cathedral and Crookston Cathedral. Beginning in 1971, playoffs were introduced to determine the teams from the St. Paul and Minneapolis regions. In 1974, all entries were determined by playoffs.

Independent tournament data is courtesy Jim Just. Jim has also provided the Section 3 scores up to 1979 and verified scores for other years. Primary sources for all information here are newspaper accounts and playoff/tournament programs.

In 1975, the Minnesota State High School League admitted 18 private schools with hockey teams, provoking a major section realignment. Prior to 1975, the runners-up in Regions 7 and 8 played for the Region 3 championship. The new Section 3 was comprised of schools from the north and east metro and changed very little until 1992. A new school, Woodbury, was added in 1976. Mariner merged with White Bear Lake in 1984, and St. Anthony formed a co-op with St. Agnes in 1989.

There were also few changes to the other sections in that era. The most notable was the 1981 shift of the Bloomington schools from Section 1 to Section 5, which had previously been the domain of the Minneapolis city conference.

The two tier system adopted in 1992 still involved eight sections, with the top eight seeds in each section playing in Tier 1 and the remaining seeds playing in Tier 2. Top schools that changed sections included Burnsville and Apple Valley, which went from 1 to 2, the Duluth schools and Cloquet from 2 to 7, and Edina from 6 to 5. Section 3 gained the St. Paul city schools, formerly in 4, and Roseville, formerly in 2. Most of the rest of the old Section 4 became Section 2, and the non-Duluth portion of 2 became 4.

The two-tier system lasted for two years and was replaced by a two-class system based on enrollment. Schools that fell into the small school Class A category could opt to play up to Class AA, as Hill-Murray and South St. Paul did, later joined by Roseau and Holy Angels.

The period from 1994-2007 saw more changes than 1975-1991, but little change to the base geographical region of each section. Significant moves were Edina back to 6 and Apple Valley to 5 in 1994, Bloomington Jefferson from 5 to 6 in 2002, and Elk River, which went from 4 to 8 to 7 back to 4 and back to 7. Roseville went from 3 to 2 in 2002, won Section 2 twice, then was switched back to 3.

2008 brought the most significant changes in more than a decade. Sections 2-5 rotated numbers and switched some teams. Centennial joined the northwest metro schools in Section 5, and Edina and Jefferson joined Holy Angels and the southwest metro schools in Section 2. The southeast metro became Section 3 and the northeast metro Section 4. Section 1 remained southern Minnesota, Section 6 the west metro, and Section 8 northwestern Minnesota. Anoka joined Elk River and northern schools Duluth East, Cloquet, and Grand Rapids in Section 7, which increasingly came to resemble the old Section 2. Class A saw even more widespread changes.

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