I don't think that's true? It's just that they're not a huge public thing, televised, random locals watching live, with people attending the 'college' purely to play for the team, studying as a technicality. The only people involved, generally, are those playing (self-organised).
I played ice hockey in the UK university league (which was at the time in the EU, but I'm not nitpicking that point) and the team occasionally travelled abroad (I went to Eindhoven, NL) to play other university teams in Europe. (And get absolutely thrashed: hockey's bigger in much of Europe, especially colder countries, than it is in the UK, so they were the cream of a big pool of talent, while we were ..scraping a team together from interested parties is only slightly an exaggeration.)