By Geoff Smith (@GeoffSmithLNN on Twitter)

Lethbridge awarded 2019 men’s university hockey championship

Feb 1, 2018 | 5:51 AM

TORONTO – The University of Lethbridge has been partially successful, in its bid to host the 2019 and 2020 U SPORTS national men’s hockey championships.

Thursday morning, Feb. 1, the national university sport body announced it has awarded the 2019 University Cup to the University of Lethbridge Pronghorns. At the same time, it announced Sports and Entertainment Atlantic will stage the event in 2020, hosted by the Acadia Axemen.

The tournament will run Mar. 14-17, 2019 at the ENMAX Centre.

The Pronghorns Athletics department said it had bid for two years partly to mitigate the financial risk of hosting. City council committed $125,000 per year for each of the two years if the bid was successful, from the Community Event Grant Fund.

“The bids that we received were excellent which demonstrates a strong interest in hosting a U SPORTS national championship,” president and CEO Graham Brown said in a news release.

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Ken McInnes, executive director of sport and recreation services, said in a news reelase that the announcement “reflects the hard work in rebuilding our hockey program, especially by our coach Spiros Anastas.” McInnes also thanked city council for supporting the bid with a grant.

It will be the first University Cup staged in Western Canada since 2014. This year’s event is being hosted by the University of New Brunswick.

The Pronghorns have won the national men’s hockey title once, defeating Guelph 5-2 in the 1994 final at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens.