TOLEDO, Ohio — Mike Schafer was going through the emotions.
He was angry after an overtime loss to Boston University on Saturday brought down the curtain on his 30-season head coaching tenure at Cornell.
He was contemplative about the state of college sports and his Big Red players’ spot in it as what he called “the truest student-athletes.”
He was self-deprecating in the admission of being “the best friggin’ coach going in the first round of the NCAA” who “just couldn’t get it done in the second round.”
And Schafer looked out into the group of people sitting in front of him in a news conference at Huntington Center, where the Big Red fell 3-2 to the Terriers, and spotted someone who knows all about the journey.
Bob Daniels, the coach at Ferris State for the last 33 years, also was on a retirement tour this season. Schafer announced this would be his last campaign at Cornell last June; Daniels made it public in January.
Daniels was on site at the regional as a member of the NCAA Division I men’s hockey committee.
“Good friend. Coached 33 years,” Schafer said from the dais. “We have a saying in our locker room and I put it on our T-shirt: ‘Only we know.’ Only we know as coaches what our wives go through, what our family goes through.
“And fans think they know; they have no idea. It’s everybody’s job, right? No one knows what an AD does or vice president or president. No one knows. So I’m grateful for our fans but I’m really grateful for the camaraderie of Bobby.”
Schafer’s career ended with a 561-300-117 record, putting him 22nd on the NCAA men’s hockey all-time coaching wins list. This year’s Big Red made an impressive run through the postseason to add to the total.
They finished sixth in ECAC Hockey after being decimated by injuries but had a lot of the pieces back in place by the postseason. Goalie Ian Shane was back in form as Cornell dumped Yale in the opening round, then went on the road to sweep Colgate.
A late rally led to an overtime win over Quinnipiac in the ECAC semifinals in Lake Placid, N.Y., and the Big Red capped off Schafer’s seventh playoff title by beating Clarkson.
Another frantic finish Thursday with a 4-3 win over Michigan State got them to the regional final, where it was heartbreak again. Cornell has lost its last eight times reaching the game before the Frozen Four since Schafer’s only trip to the NCAA semifinals in 2003.
Amid the appreciation Schafer expressed about a half-hour after the Quinn Hutson overtime goal went in, the competitor in Schafer also came through.
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say there wasn’t a lot of anger there for losing tonight,” he said.
Schafer played defense for four years at Cornell from 1982 to 1986. Then-Big Red coach Lou Reycroft gave him “the chance of a lifetime” with an assistant coaching position paying $14,000 right out of college. He stayed in that role for four seasons before going to a similar position at Western Michigan for five.
When he returned to his alma mater as head coach in 1995, the Ithaca Journal recalled a 1983 game against Harvard in which Schafer skated out after his name was called in pregame introductions and broke his stick over his head.
“The Lynah Rink crowd went berserk and Cornell ended up winning the game,” the newspaper reported.
It seems that Schafer has always been emotional in one way or another.
On Saturday, the last note was of appreciation.
“It’s given me everything,” Schafer said of coaching at Cornell. “It’s given my family everything. It’s given me joy. It’s given me security, a great place in Ithaca to raise my kids. It has done everything in life that I think any person would want. So it’s not bad: Good career and an unbelievable wife and family. That’s all you can ask for.”
