Nashua South-Pelham's Broden Landsteiner, left, battles North-Souhegan's Connor O'Neil in front of Kings goalie Noah Soule during the Backyard Brawl Holiday Tourney at Conway Arena in late December. A proposal will be considered tonight by the Nashua Board of Education to merge the North and South based teams.. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA – There may not be a hockey Battle of the Bridge in 2026.

Why? Well, the first official step for what city high school hockey fans have clamored for the last several years is being taken tonight.

That’s when Nashua Athletic Director Lisa Gingras will present to the Board of Education a plan to end the North and South hockey co-ops with Souhegan and Pelham, respectively, and merge the two Nashua teams to form one collective Nashua ice hockey team in Division I for the 2025-26 season.

“For our North-Souhegan co-op right now, we had pretty low numbers,” Gingras told The Telegraph on Sunday. “And then looking at the history on the numbers of skaters we’ve gotten from Souhegan and gotten from Pelham has diminished over the past few years. … And between the two boys programs right now, we’re graduationg a total of 18 kids. …So we’re looking at the future.”

That’s not the only thing Gingras will be presenting for hockey. While Souhegan athletic director Kelli Braley is said to be presenting other potential boys co-op options to the Amherst school committee later this week, she as well as Gingras are also presenting plans to their respective school boards to have Souhegan tri-op with North and South to form a girls high school hockey team. The Sabers have long had a singular girls team but Nashua has never had girls hockey, which has been an NHIAA sport for several years now.

“Financially and facility resources, we can support two ice hockey programs,” Gingras said. “There has been interest on the girls side, and Souhegan has had declining numbers on the girls side. So to help save them, and give our kids an opportunity, it makes sense to do the two things together.”

For Nashua, the move to merge the two city high school boys hockey programs has been a long time coming. Gingras and school officials had long resisted the idea, feeling that it might set a precedent that would open up the opportunity for any other theoretically struggling Nashua North and South sports to try to co-op as an easy fix.

But co-ops and.or tri-ops (three schools) have been the rule rather than the exception for the sport of boys and girls hockey over the last five to 10 years in every division except Division I. In that league, the only co-ops are with the two Nashua schools, plus and the three Manchester public schools merging to form the Manchester Kings, for a total of three.

But Division II has six of its 13, and Division III has seven of its nine teams as co-ops. In girls hockey, half (eight of 16 the teams (one division) are co-ops.

“Hockey’s so different,” Gingras said. “If you look at the landscape of hockey throughout the whole state – I had a conversation with the chair of the ice hockey committee on Friday, and he’s looking at what can we do as a state to save ice hockey in our state.

“So I think ice hockey is very different; the political landscape of ‘If we can do it there, why can’t we do it in other places’ – this is different. Looking at ice hockey from the view of the pure expense of what it takes to run an ice hockey program, but also the personal standpoint, the expense it takes to be an ice hockey player. The equipment, the skates, the sticks, etc., there’s not a lot of ice hockey kids who say ‘I’ve never skated before, let me try hockey.’ It’s something their families have invested in their whole lives. So we’re seeing that impact, especially in our community.”

Gingras said it’s been coming for a couple of years, but the numbers have reached a breaking point. “Six months or so we’ve been talking about it,” she said.

There is a deadline. All the paperwork has to be turned into the NHIAA by the end of February,and that includes the minutes from the school boards of Nashua for the boys and girls and Souhegan for the girls, so those decisions need to be finalized with board approvals. Paperwork for the dissolution of the current boys co-ops have been signed by officials of the four schools.

Therefore, a Board of Education approval tonight would just be the first step. First both proposals need to be presented to and approved by the NHIAA ice hockey committee. Then it would go to the NHIAA Classification Committee, and assuming it gets approval there, the final approval comes in May by the NHIAA Executive Council.

The move tends to make a lot of sense. There are 12 North and just six Souhegan players on the Saber-Titans, which became a co-op team back in 2015. The South-Pelham Kings, which have been in existence the last nine years, have just two Pelham players, an all-time low.

The next question is, assuming all the approvals go through, who would coach the Nashua boys team? That’s something Gingras said wouldn’t be ultimately decided on until everything is made official in May. But there will likely be plenty of exploratory work done. North-Souhegan is coached by Chris Zarlenga, now in his second year, while Nashua South has been coached the last few years by Jordan Sarracco. The coaches were told this past week.

“We had that conversation and we’ll continue to have that conversation,” Gingras said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have that answer yet. And we will not know the final answer until May.”

Will the job have to be opened up? Or have the two head coaches work together?

“We’re going to have to figure all those pieces out,” Gingras said. “Those are the pieces we haven’t ironed out yet.”

Gingras met with the coaches separately, and then Thursday she had a joint meeting with both teams together before the co-op issue this past Friday was officially placed on the Board of Education meeting agenda for tonight.

In any event, it will be a big change to the ice hockey landscape.

As Gingras noted, there has also in recent years a move afoot to try to get a girls program in Nashua. Souhegan, meanwhile, after having a solid program pre-COVID, has seen its numbers and competitive ability dwindle in recent years. The plan, according to the proposal to be presented to both school boards, is for the current Souhegan coaching staff to be coaching the program. Like with the Nashua boys, Conway Arena would be the home rink. If all goes through, the team would assume the schedule already in place for next year for the singular Souhegan team.

The goal concerning both genders is to save the programs but also get the competitive level up. North-Souhegan, after barely missing the tournament last year, is currently 0-9 while South-Pelham is 1-6. The Souhegan girls are 0-8.