Juggling Bright-Eyed Prospects

He had appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He was one of the most highly recruited high school hockey players ever. He would become the first American to score 50 goals in an NHL season.

He wanted to go to Harvard.

Harvard said no.

Bobby Carpenter--who now plays for the New York Rangers of the NHL--was a star hockey player for St. John's Prep School in Danvers. When he was a senior in 1981, college recruiters flocked to see him perform. Val Belmonte, then a Harvard assistant coach, came, too.

Belmonte wanted Carpenter to come play for the Crimson. But as it turned out, Carpenter just didn't have the academic credentials to get into the school.

"He was a good kid, a first class kid," Belmonte says. "He was a marginal student, very marginal. His father wanted him to come to Harvard badly. [Then-Dean of Admissions] Fred Jewett gave me a signal that Bobby wouldn't be right for Harvard."

"I had to tell Bobby's father that," Belmonte continues. "It was at a game and Mr. Carpenter was sitting there. I came up to him and told him that it didn't look very promising for his son. He started chewing me out--in front of maybe 1000 people. I said, `Hey, it's not my doing,' but he just kept it up."

"He told me later that it was the first time his son got rejected from anything," Belmonte concludes.

Carpenter's case is not unusual. Often the Harvard coaches come across a promising hockey player who just doesn't have the kind of transcript that qualifies him for Harvard. To these athletes, the Harvard coaches--as hard as it is--just say no.

Recruiting for Harvard's hockey team is no easy task. It involves long hours on the phone and long hours on the road. And when you've finally found that talented player--the guy who is big and quick and can put a puck into a net from anywhere on the ice--you discover that he flunked biology.

"We might start with a very large list [of potential candidates]," Assistant Coach Ronn Tomassoni said. "Once we find out what the marks are, the SATs, the Achievement Tests and everything else, that list will shrink very quickly. You're looking for the combination of high ability with a good academic record."

The pool of potential recruits is smaller for Harvard than it is for most schools because of the academic restraints. The fact that Harvard offers financial aid--and not scholarships--also works against the Harvard recruiter.

But except for these difficulties, Harvard "is not a bad place to recruit for," according to Tomassoni. "We can go anywhere and people have heard of us."

Tomassonni is by necessity exceptionally well-organized. His desk is neat and he keeps all the information about potential recruits--which may number 700 at the beginning of the recruiting season--in two notebooks. While Head Coach Bill Cleary is only part-time, guiding the Crimson in the fall and winter while returning to an insurance business in the spring and summer, Tomassoni is full-time.

He spends a good deal of time on the road, going to games and tournaments, searching for the kid who meet Harvard's athletic and academic standards.

"Recruiting has become a year-long process," Tomassoni says, "and I'm not sure that's a good thing."

Tomassoni's main turf is the New England area. Here more than anywhere else, Harvard is a dominating force in the recruiting wars.

The competition for recruits--even on its home turf--is intense. Harvard not only has to battle with Ivy League rivals like Yale and Princeton, but also with Boston schools like Northeastern, Boston University and Boston College and schools with huge programs--and big recruiting budgets--like Wisconsin and North Dakota.

"If the kid was trying to decide between Yale, Princeton and Harvard, I could be 95 percent sure he'd pick Harvard," Belmonte said. "But when he was being recruited for scholarship schools like Wisconsin and North Dakota, it was another story. Some parents look at [paying for Harvard] versus a full ride."

But the chance to go to Harvard is a once-in-a-lifetime shot. And most parents--and their hockey-playing children--are aware of that.

"Everyone wants a Harvard education," B.C. Coach Len Ceglarski says.

Harvard can offer not only its 350 years of academic excellence, but a hockey program that is one of the finest in the nation and a coach who starred for Harvard and played in the Olympics.

"I'm fortunate having gone here," Cleary says. "I understand what goes through the kids' minds. There's a lot of pressure on them and you're going to take that into consideration."

Both Belmonte and Tomassoni admit that the advantages of recruiting for Harvard far outweigh the disadvantages. ECAC coaches who have to come up against Harvard in the recruiting wars also concede that Harvard has the inside track when it comes to landing a fine player.

"We're always the underdog when it comes to Harvard," Yale Coach Tim Taylor says. "If Harvard is on top of [the recruit's] list, there's nothing I can do about it."

"Going one-on-one with Harvard for a recruit, we probably wouldn't get him unless he really liked the rural area or didn't want to move far from home," St. Lawrence Coach Joe Marsh says. "Harvard gets the cream of the crop. We tend to get some good kids in the Ottawa Valley and Toronto areas."

Belmonte, now the head coach at the University of Chicago-Illinois, sees the pool of good hockey players growing smaller each year. Athletes are turning to other sports in high school like football and soccer, Belmonte says.

In the future, as the pool of players grows smaller and smaller, the competition for those players will grow fiercer. Even then, though, Harvard will have an advantage over the competition.

"Harvard is an easy sell," Belmonte says. "It's a lot harder to sell the University of Chicago-Illinois. I have to explain who I am, where my school is. We don't have the tradition that Harvard does."

"When I was an assistant at Harvard, I said I'm Val Belmonte and I'm from Harvard," he concludes, "and--boom!--I got attention."