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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Ice Age 
When it was over, when the most prolific and captivating hockey season Yale has ever seen reached its all-too-early end, it was the sounds that stood out. There was Jimmy Martin ’11 click-clacking his way up the wooden dais of the interview room, because the captain couldn’t bring himself to take off his uniform, not even his skates—not yet. There was Broc Little ’11, eyes red, speaking softly and deliberately as he tried, not entirely successfully, to keep his voice from trembling. And there was the muffled sound, every time the door swung open, of Minnesota–Duluth’s celebration in a nearby dressing room. As the saying goes, the higher they climb, the harder they fall. Now was not a time when the graduating seniors—who were about to peel off their Yale sweaters and leave them behind for good—could contemplate, and marvel at, the significance of this scene. The three players who trudged in for their obligatory interviews after losing the NCAA East Regional Final for the second straight year—falling just one win short of the “Frozen Four,” college hockey’s national semifinals—were three of the principal reasons the Yale men’s hockey program had risen to such lofty heights in the first place. Just happy to be here? Not these guys, not anymore. “There is no question about it: Yale has arrived at an elite level of hockey,” says Bob Brooke ’83, who starred at Yale before moving on to a seven-year career with the New York Rangers, Minnesota North Stars, and New Jersey Devils of the NHL. “That’s not taking away from the special group that this might be. It’s just great for Keith Allain, great for those players, great for Yale. That program has arrived.” You could argue that it was a long time coming. It was a group of Yale students who brought ice hockey from Canada to American colleges back in Grover Cleveland’s second term, and who played the first intercollegiate game, against Johns Hopkins in February 1896. The problem is, Yale’s national success in hockey—or football, or basketball, or baseball, or any of the sports that Americans fill arenas to watch—has long been thought to be a thing of the past, visible only in old black-and-white photos at Mory’s. So you could forgive students and alumni if they were surprised to see the banner headline of the Yale Daily News on December 8, 2010, over a picture of the hockey team: “YALE IS NO. 1.” It was an unprecedented feat for the program, and no fluke or flash in the pan, either: a December weekend sweep of Rensselaer and Union, part of a ten-game, two-month-long winning streak, pushed the Bulldogs to the top of both major national polls, where they would stay for eight weeks. Making up in speed, skill, and relentlessness what they lacked in size, the Bulldogs would finish the season tops in the nation in both offense (4.19 goals per game) and defense (2.06 goals against per game). By January 22, their record stood at 17–2. By March, they had swept their way to a second ECAC tournament title in three years. (Yale and the five other hockey-playing Ivy schools compete in the ECAC, a conference that also includes six other Northeastern schools.) Their record stood at 27–6–1, and—much to the chagrin of the more traditional NCAA hockey powers, who sometimes deride the Bulldogs’ conference as the “EZAC”—Yale entered the NCAA tournament as the number-one overall seed. Brooke, who now lives in Minnesota, made several trips back East to watch his old college team play, including a memorable one on a January evening at the customarily sold-out Ingalls Rink. By the time he walked through the front doors, the Whale was already jammed and the Yale Precision Marching Band was blaring. “It gave me chills,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m walking into the home of the number-one team in the nation.’” If you’re looking to chart the ascent of Yale hockey, a good place to start would be April 15, 2006, when the school hired Keith Allain ’80 as coach. The Bulldogs were coming off a 10–20–3 season in 2005–06, resulting in the rancorous nudging aside of the legendary Tim Taylor, the former Harvard captain who over a 28-year career in New Haven amassed more wins (337) than any hockey coach in Yale history. Allain had starred as a goaltender for Taylor’s teams of the late ’70s, then returned to Yale to begin his coaching career as an assistant to Taylor. He was the goaltending coach for the NHL’s St. Louis Blues when Yale offered him the top job. Uneasily, but with Taylor’s blessing, he took over from his former coach, boss, and mentor. After an 11–17–3 debut in 2006–07, Allain’s teams have had winning seasons ever since, including a school-record 28 wins this season that surpassed the record of 24 set just two years earlier. And Allain has put his undeniable stamp on his alma mater’s program, which is something of an intriguing blend: a hyper-focused, demanding, “blue-collar coach,” as Taylor described him, whose up-tempo, full-speed-ahead style of play belies his philosophy that this is, after all, a game, and it’s supposed to be, you know, fun. “He understands,” says Brooke, who was a teammate of Allain as a freshman in 1979–80, then had Allain as an assistant coach in 1982–83. “You like to think that hockey is first and foremost in the thoughts of players at this level, Division I, but he gets that there are other things going through the minds of 20-to-24-year-old students.” The fun is reserved for players and fans, though. With reporters, Allain rarely strays from serious. Following a victory over St. Lawrence at Ingalls Rink that sent Yale to the ECAC semifinals in Atlantic City, Allain was asked to describe just how much he was enjoying himself; frowning, he replied, “It doesn’t get much better than this.” But then, of course, it did. The Bulldogs went to South Jersey and overwhelmed Colgate and Cornell by a combined score of 10–0, to win the ECAC tournament for only the second time in school history. (The first was in 2009.) “I don’t know how it was with their old coach, but Coach Allain has really got them going,” Colgate senior Francois Brisebois lamented following Yale’s 4–0 victory in the semifinal round. “They are so fast. You look down for a second, and they’re right on top of you, and then they’ve got a forward flying down to the other end.” When the Bulldog skaters couldn’t smother a Colgate or Cornell attack, goaltender Ryan Rondeau ’11 did. The senior from Carvel, Alberta, posted a school-record six shutouts this season. Three of those were in the final three games of the conference tournament, part of a staggering stretch of 240 minutes, 53 seconds of play without surrendering a goal. Most hockey coaches, Allain not surprisingly included, share the opinion that hockey goaltender is the most important single position in sports—more so than quarterback, pitcher, you name it. It’s the reason why this season’s Bulldogs could feel a national championship in their grasp: this year, they had a starting goalie they could count on. Four different goalies saw at least six games of action in 2009–10, three of them in one important game alone—the NCAA East Regional final, a wild and unsightly 9–7 loss to Boston College in which Rondeau replaced Billy Blase ’10 and allowed five goals on 18 shots before being replaced himself. “Last year was tough; night to night you never really knew who was going to be in there,” says Little, one of nine members of the superlative and close-knit Class of 2011. “But this year Rondeau has come in and been a steady presence in there, and we know he’s going to be there for us.” Allain, who knows a thing or two about coaching goaltenders, took Rondeau aside after the Boston College game for what the coach called “a long heart-to-heart.” “We talked about how I believed he was a better goaltender than he believed he was,” Allain says. “I asked him, ‘How badly do you want this? This is what you need to do. Are you willing to do it?’ Clearly he was, because it was all him. He went out and he took care of business. If you saw him now, the way he prepares for practice, the way he prepares for games, he’s a guy who truly deserves to be successful.” To Rondeau, physical ability wasn’t the issue; the issue was in his mind. “I think we both knew I had the talent to play. I had spurts my first three years where I’d play well for a little bit and then I’d have a bad game,” Rondeau says. “I always knew I could be a good goalie, and I was confident in myself—it was just about taking the necessary mental steps to get there.” Rondeau spent much of his summer vacation working with a sports psychologist, which he believes helped him more than anything. Together they mapped out a routine for Rondeau to follow before each game and each practice, and they devised techniques to drown out the crowd, the bands, and the hecklers that had been throwing him off his game. And they cultivated a short memory, the ability to forget about a goal almost as soon as it goes in. His efforts allowed his naturally calm and quiet personality to start working in his favor. He came into this season as a true number-one goaltender, so dependable throughout the year that when Allain was asked about the change in Rondeau on the eve of the NCAA tournament, he shot back, “When are people going to stop talking about our goaltending? He’s been fantastic all year long. Since Day One of the season.” Short memories are not always desirable in hockey. None of the Bulldogs’ upperclassmen, for instance, could forget the sting of their season-ending loss to BC last spring—nor did they wish to forget. Early this season, the players took to wearing T-shirts bearing a slogan that would be their rallying cry throughout the year: “Unfinished Business.” Jimmy Martin was one of the main men behind the T-shirts, which, in the end, is not surprising. When Allain first took over at Yale, Martin was the first recruit his coaching staff targeted and the first to commit to Yale in the Allain era. Born in St. Louis, Martin left home at age 15 in pursuit of higher levels of hockey and attended three high schools in three states, a teenage odyssey that “made me grow up,” he says, and grow into a leader. In May of his junior year at Yale, his teammates elected him captain. A defensive defenseman whose offensive upside only peeked its head out in his senior year, Martin pretty well fit what came to be the mold of an Allain recruit: fit, fast, and awfully small. Martin was one of nine players on this season’s roster listed at 5-foot-9 or below. Yet that’s a list that includes five of the team’s top eight scorers in 2010–11, including Little, who’s soon to graduate, and Brian O’Neill ’12 and Andrew Miller ’13, who were numbers one and two in scoring and will be back in the fall. On a team that had nine seniors and could spread the burden of leadership around, it was Martin who emerged above all as the voice of the team’s conscience and identity, and not just as a T-shirt designer. The Bulldogs, by finishing second to upstart Union in the ECAC regular-season standings, earned the benefit of a bye week before taking on St. Lawrence in the conference quarterfinals. Asked how the team kept its focus during two idle weeks, Allain offered much of the credit to his captain. Martin, mindful of Yale’s flat performance in an ECAC quarterfinal loss to heavy underdog Brown the year before, was eager for meetings with his coach, “all initiated by him, about getting people ready, making absolutely sure people were ready,” Allain said. “It was really important to him and to this senior class.” And that senior class, in turn, was clearly important to Allain, not least because it was the first group he and his staff lured to Yale. In the emotional moments after their college careers had been closed, a downtrodden Allain told a roomful of reporters, “I’m not ready to eulogize this class just yet.” But if you had asked five people in that room who Yale’s star was this season, you might have gotten five different answers, not all of them from the Class of 2011. For all the Bulldogs’ talent and accomplishments in recent years, no Eli has been among the ten finalists for the Hobey Baker Memorial Award, given annually to college hockey’s most outstanding player, since Chris Higgins ’05 in 2003. Taylor’s later teams, including his best, the 1997–98 squad that brought home Yale’s first-ever ECAC title, were top-heavy on the stat sheet, with stars such as Higgins and Jeff Hamilton ’01 (a two-time Hobey Baker finalist) bearing much of the scoring load and Ray Giroux ’98 (Hobey finalist as a senior) anchoring the defense. Allain disdains the term “secondary scoring,” which means scoring contributions from more than just top players or a top line, but his teams are notable for it: this season, seven different Bulldogs reached double-digit totals in goals, and four earned more than 40 points. On the ’97–’98 ECAC-winning team, those numbers were two and one, respectively. Such a balanced model may prove difficult to sustain, but it also may be the ideal approach for a school like Yale, where elite athletic recruits aren’t automatically a good academic fit. As long as he remains at Yale, Allain will have to contend with the twin handicaps familiar to Ivy League coaches, whose schools don’t do athletic scholarships and do set the academic bar high. Brooke, who sees a bright future for Yale hockey, doesn’t want to hear it. “Who says outstanding athletics and outstanding academics can’t go hand in hand?” he asks. The Bulldogs had almost no time to bask in their thrilling overtime win over Air Force in their NCAA tournament opener on March 25. They had a game less than 24 hours away against Minnesota–Duluth, with a trip to the Frozen Four at stake—a berth that would have represented another new pinnacle for Yale’s program. In fact, Denny Kearney ’11 (brother, incidentally, of the U.S. Olympic gold-medal mogul skier Hannah Kearney) described his team’s reaction to the winning goal by Chad Ziegler ’12 as “a big sigh of relief,” which is not to diminish the fact that it was among the biggest goals any Yalie has ever scored. Not far down that list is the goal O’Neill knocked in to put Yale in front, 1–0, in the second period of that same game, a goal that gave Allain yet another reason to state after the game that the undersized, gritty O’Neill was “the heart and soul of our team.” With that said, it is impossible to overstate the impact of what happened in the second period against Minnesota–Duluth, the team Yale had knocked from the national number-one spot back in December. Before a packed house of 7,861 at Bridgeport’s Arena at Harbor Yard, all but a handful cheering for Yale, the Elis started flat and sloppy, with a slew of foolhardy penalties helping to put them in a 3–0 hole. With the team in desperate need of a spark, O’Neill provided it by scoring on a power play 11:30 into the second period. After only eight more seconds had been played, O’Neill was thrown out of the game, deemed to have struck an opponent in the head on a crushing hit at center ice that, upon review of the replay, probably should not have been a penalty at all, let alone a major penalty and ejection from the game. “In hindsight, the game was over then,” Allain said after the game, and after Martin and company had click-clacked somberly out of the interview room. “We didn’t feel that way at the time, because we’re fighting our tails off to the final buzzer, but looking back now, it was over right there.” Two Minnesota–Duluth goals on the resulting advantage in manpower made the score 5–1, and in spite of an eminently admirable effort that brought Yale within 5–3 with just less than seven minutes left, this remarkable season was finished, too. For the second straight year, Rondeau watched the end of his NCAA tournament from the bench, replaced for the third period by Nick Maricic ’13. It was a move Allain said was an attempt to spark his team, because “it became clear it wasn’t going to be Ryan’s night.” But it was one that also seemed to have an eye toward 2011–12, giving a taste of the tournament to next season’s frontrunner for the starting goaltender’s job. “Sure, there were disappointments at the end, but this season—it’s a credit not just to the players but to Keith Allain for bringing life into the program,” Brooke says. “I can tell you firsthand, from the Yale community, the hockey alumni, that this was an exciting, inspiring thing to watch, and we look forward to watching it continue as a rebirth of Yale hockey, and maybe Yale athletics as a whole.” No matter what direction the program takes from here, to a Yale hockey fan, 2010–11 will be a season that never fades. For now, at least, the unfinished business remains, too. |
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