Usually she dries her equipment in her closet, where her clothes tend to pick up the notorious reek of hockey skates, gloves and pads.

“It is what it is,” McManaman said, shrugging.

Michigan has a men’s club hockey team, and it, too, has no permanent locker room and constant funding woes. But at a university that spends so heavily on athletics, the contrast between the highest level for men’s hockey and women’s hockey is startling.

The women’s team gets by with donations from local businesses and grants from the student government. One grant covered the cost of a team bus for a trip to Massachusetts this season. Sometimes players earn money for the team by sweeping up Michigan’s arena after basketball games.

“We practice as much as varsity sports and we travel, but we don’t get the recognition,” said Carolyn Andonian, a sophomore forward majoring in business. “I think we should be varsity, or at least have some more resources.”

A spokesman for the Michigan athletic department said the school had no plans to add a varsity sport.

Andonian and others say they do not think gender bias is the issue, simply the cost of fielding an N.C.A.A. hockey team. At North Dakota, the women’s varsity team cost a reported $2 million a year, and the university’s president, Mark Kennedy, has said $60 million would need to be raised to endow the program.

The math of Title IX is also part of it. If Michigan added women’s hockey to the varsity level, it would have to either add a men’s sport or cut a women’s team to keep the number of male and female athletes even. And most women’s teams do not generate revenue for an athletic department.