Every year, the debate surrounding the Ivy League schools in college hockey ends with one of the more mind-boggling stalemates among the sport’s followers.
It seldom advances beyond their unique or quirky scheduling arrangement limiting the six hockey-sponsored schools to six fewer games than the rest of college hockey, a debate that’s almost never accurately explained or outlined with concrete or historical documentation. They rank as six of the most historic or ancient (pun intended) schools in college hockey, but asking anyone about their status usually draws an eye roll or annoyed grunt.
Nobody believes in the Ivy League, and it’s completely mind-bending to discuss their overall strength as other teams pile victories around them. Because they’re not playing, the rationale at the start of the season implies that other teams are simply better, and any immediate loss is treated as reason to dump the teams under some unadvanced or misplaced bias.
The fact remains that Ivy League hockey programs are nationally competitive, and the snickering over Cornell’s status as a top-10 team without a game played quickly fell apart when the Big Red swept North Dakota last weekend. In an instant, the one first place vote that drew considerable consternation became more of a ringing endorsement for a team that improved to 2-0 under a head coach who entered his final season of proving any and all doubters wrong.
“I thought we played hard,” said Mike Schafer of his team’s two victories over the sixth-ranked Fighting Hawks. “We’re a 07. For us, the first two games of the year are where we made quite a few mistakes. We didn’t play as physical as we needed to play, and they were sharp against our penalty kill. We made some mistakes, and our goaltending had to bail us out, so there are some things to work, but any time you can get two wins against a heck of a hockey team, you’re pleased when you could play solidly.”
Schafer entered his 30th and final season as Cornell’s head coach with six previous trips to the top of the ECAC mountain, but previous success didn’t stop doubters from loudly talking about the Big Red ahead of the Friday-Saturday doubleheader. They’d swept non-conference games to start two of the previous three seasons, but the wins over Minnesota-Duluth and Alaska flimsily fell apart under a season-long microscope.
Non-believers possessed plenty of ammunition against a team emanating from a league with less national firepower than Hockey East or the Big Ten, and not even finishing the season as the No. 12 team in the Pairwise with an NCAA Northeast Regional win over Maine was enough to stop the chuckling at the Big Red’s preseason status.
None of that quashed the belief in Cornell’s internal mechanisms, though, and playing with an edge allowed the Big Red to rally past the Fighting Hawks in one of the higher-profile non-conference matchups of the season’s first month.
On both nights, Cornell was forced to confront an opponent that wouldn’t stop, and on Friday, North Dakota negated Nick DeSantis’ goal in the first 100 seconds by potting a tying goal before the four-minute mark. Less than 90 seconds later, Tyler Catalano beat goalie TJ Semptimphelter, and after Nicholas Wolfenberg added a third goal in the first period, head coach Brad Berry opted for a change to Hobie Hedquist between the pipes as part of a 4-1 opening night win.
“One of the biggest mistakes I made as a young coach was assuming that veterans know what’s going on and can kickstart everything back up,” Schafer said. “Everybody wants to try to do a little bit more, but new guys are in the lineup and others might want more roles. Guys might have gotten better [in the offseason], so one of the mistakes we didn’t make this year as a coaching staff, we went right back to basics. We retaught everything, redid everything, and we got ready to get those fundamentals and foundations under us so we could proceed to get better as a team.”
Spilling that momentum and mentality into Saturday night enabled the Big Red to score a second victory by coming from behind. Like Friday, Cornell scored its first goal in the first three minutes of the first period, but after Jack O’Leary added a second goal halfway through the second, North Dakota went on a tear and scored three goals over eight minutes. James scored almost immediately after O’Leary to empty air out of Lynah Rink’s balloon, but the 3-2 lead forced Schafer to confront his team’s resilience in the locker room ahead of a third-period rally that added three goals and upended the Fighting Hawks with a 5-3 decision.
“They’re resilient,” said Schafer of his team. “They started to develop that ability last year, even in the ECAC semifinal against Dartmouth, but the way they came out in the third and made adjustments to play together is something that we struggled with early in last year. There was a quiet confidence to our locker room, and we were disappointed with some of the mistakes that we made that we won’t make over the next two or three weeks. But we just stuck with the game plan.”
By executing, Cornell’s band of Big Red skaters silenced doubters who spent a month looking at a team with no record in the national top-10. The team that earned one intrepid first place vote replaced North Dakota as the No. 6 team in this week’s USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll, and an ECAC league looking to fill its top slot vacuum after Quinnipiac slipped to No. 15 nationally found its early season candidate in the team that didn’t appear in a game until the calendar turned to November.
“This isn’t so much about trying to play catch up,” said Schafer, “but it’s more about battling through some of the physicality that needs to be caught up. You’re going to make mistakes that are just early season mistakes, and you hope you can survive them. You know they’re coming, and when we did, [goalie] Ian Shane made saves when we needed him. That’s the thing; it’s not about effort. We came out and played really strong.”
The sixth-ranked Big Red enter into Ivy League and ECAC play this weekend when they face Yale and the debuting Brown at home in Ithaca, N.Y.
