A lot of the online competitive scenes have their own chat service somewhere. In the past this was done via different IRC servers and to have a channel there used to be pretty common, but many gaming communities have moved away from IRC to new services like Discord etc. I am not to promote Discord solely here, but I can only speak of it as an example as I have experience of it from the past few months. Overwatch & Rocket league and have their members at Discord at least and the rocket league server for example has over 4000 online members at the moment. This seems to be the new direction, IRC is dying out and new services taking that place. It might be good to make a jump to a such a service where a lot of the gaming communities already exists. This makes the jump for new players easier to get in to. I know there are many similar services like Curse etc. but have no clue which one is the most popular, but I know Overwatch competitive scene & Rocket league use discord. We made a jump from AIM to Discord just recently with our tiny NHL94 community (Yes, lael AIM. :)).
I tried to look for one in the nhlgamer forums but could not find any centralized chat for it, maybe I just missed it? Or perhaps one could be impelemented if there is enough interest.
The Overwatch Finnish community in Discord has several sub channels created to that server of their own. You can have a core channel for general chat, then something for like league chat, a chat for looking for games, chat looking for players/promoting yourself/if you're able to sub etc etc. Everyone joining that server can see all those channels so it's like having your own IRC server where you see all the channels. Teams can create their own servers to Discord as well and to have a publi chat and private ones for the members only. Discord also comes up with a VoIP, but I know the Overwatch players tend to use something different like Mumble for VoIP as it's much lighter. The con is that Discord is quite heavy to use.
I'll import a picture from Discord Rocket league server as an example here below. If something like this already exists I just missed out on it from the forums and if not perhaps it could be of an open discussion. I have reserved the server NHLGamer in Discord for the admins and will release it for Kenu or Lurkins if something should come out of it. Of course there are other services as well that might be better, but I know a lot of competitive gamers already use Discord. In summary it's good for text based chat and something that that's taken IRC over for gaming sevices, but I would not use the VoIP in this service. Even bots can be used in the service. Open for discussion. You can use it by web browser or download apps to desktop/laptop/mobile.