Parallel Paths to Harvard's Blue Line

The picture hangs on the wall of their DeWolfe double, a daily reminder of how long juniors Noah Welch and Ryan Lannon have shared a blue line.

It’s a photograph of the Boston Selects, an all-star collection of nine-year-olds that are mostly grinning broadly, still too young to know that hockey players aren’t supposed to look adorable. And right in the middle, standing three feet from each other in the back row, are Harvard defensemen Welch and Lannon.

People usually have to work to find Welch, the biggest kid on the team who still had most of his baby fat in elementary school. But everyone that looks at the photo can pick out Lannon right away, the kid with the soft blond spikes and baby face.

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” Lannon says with a self-deprecating chuckle. “I’ve had the same haircut since I was eight.”

That’s not all that hasn’t changed. Even before the Boston Selects, Welch and Lannon were friends.

* * *

It all started with the Minutemen Flames, an eight-year old travel team based out of Marlborough, Mass., where Welch and Lannon met at tryouts.

“I was kind of nervous,” Welch says when asked to describe his first memory of his roommate. “It was a travel team, and when you’re young, it’s a big deal. Ryan was definitely one of the better defensemen back then, and I was just, like, big. I used to kill kids if they’d get within a foot of me, but besides that I couldn’t catch them.”

Still, both players made the team and were immediately made defensive partners. Soon after, they became buddies, too, forcing their parents to drive them the 40 minutes between Welch’s Brighton home and Lannon’s house in Grafton.

They had sleepovers almost every weekend.

“He used to sleep over at my house all the time, and honestly he could eat more than anybody I’d ever known,” Lannon says, sounding impressed more than anything. “He was out-eating my father when he was like nine. It was hilarious.”

After two years with the Minutemen, Welch was cut, and he switched over to the Boston University Junior Terriers, a squad much closer to home. Half a season later—much to Welch’s delight—Lannon followed.

“He, literally, used to just dominate,” Welch says. “So he used to do all the work and all the skating part, and I’d just bootie-bump people in the D zone.”

But the duo was once again split up.

“Then I got cut from the Terriers, too,” Welch says, shaking his head and laughing so hard he can hardly talk. “So I joined the BC Junior Eagles which was the worst team ever. Our goalie had like one eye. I kind of ruined us playing together.”

Lannon, being the good friend that he is, blames it on their old coach.

“He was kind of nuts,” Lannon explains. “We were 10 years old and every week we’d have push-up tests. I think it was, like, three pushups that Noah couldn’t do. No one worked out or anything back then, but I think coach took it personally.”

Except for a smattering of all-star games, the two played on different teams for the rest of their pre-collegiate careers. Each changed schools a handful of times, and Lannon even changed time zones.

But after seven years of separation, the two met again—at the peak of New England high school hockey.

* * *

Welch was the senior captain of St. Sebastian’s, the 34-1 powerhouse. He was an All-New England defenseman, and he wore No. 5.

Lannon was the senior captain of Cushing Academy, the 35-0 team-to-beat. He was an All-New England defenseman, and he wore No. 5.

Both were playing in the finals of the New England Prep School Championship—the biggest game of their lives—and both had signed with Harvard.

“There was a lot of hype,” Welch says. “A lot of Lannon-Welch hype, you know?”

Of course there was.

Welch was rocketing up prospect boards nationwide—his Central Scouting ranking had shot up 150 places in less than a year—and he was only a couple months away from being the No. 54 overall pick in the NHL draft.

Lannon, meanwhile, had been on the radar since he started playing Olympic development hockey at the age of 15. About the same time, the Boston Globe wrote a feature on him that described the hockey prodigy as “a parent’s dream come true: tall, handsome, talented, well-mannered, and intelligent.”

Welch and Lannon always had a lot of hype.

The game was a defensive affair, fitting considering that the headliners were arguably the two best prep defenders in the area. But in the end, St. Seb’s handed Cushing its only loss of the season, 1-0, on the way to its first ever Prep School championship.

After the game, the two teams filed across the ice shaking hands, with the captains last in both lines. When Welch reached Lannon—his childhood friend who was still seething after his team’s first loss of the season—he leaned over and told him, “Hey, don’t worry about it. We’ve got four more years left of this.”

That’s when Lannon knew things were going to work out.

“We could have easily come in here and butted heads,” Lannon says, citing their similar backgrounds as defensive superstars. “But [after Welch said that], that’s when I realized that it wasn’t going to be competitive, and I thought that was pretty cool.”

* * * * * *

Three years later, the two are anything but competitive.

On the ice, they play as differently as two defensemen can—Welch is much more of an offensive threat, while Lannon is a stay-at-home kind of defender—making any comparison difficult. And they definitely aren’t fighting for playing time.

As for the only other thing guys usually compete over, well, that’s not a problem.

“The only big difference between us is when it comes to girls,” says Welch, who has been in a steady relationship since freshman year. “We are complete opposites when it comes to girls, but besides that, we are pretty much the same person.”

Lannon chuckles at this, and insists his lack of a serious girlfriend is not his fault.

“Girls just notice the fact that we’re always together,” Lannon says. “So they tell me, “Oh, if someone wants to date you they pretty much have to date Noah, too.” So that’s the problem. The girls don’t like Noah.”

Considering how similar he is to his roommate, that shouldn’t offer much consolation.

They have the same favorite movie (Good Will Hunting), the same favorite wrap (chicken caesar with no cheese), the same thick Boston accents and laid-back attitudes.

Their AOL instant messenger screennames—which they’ve both had since high school—are the exact same combination of initials, names and hockey number. “It’s kinda scary,” Lannon says. “There have always been little things like that that kind of throw me off.”

They were even drafted by the same NHL team—the Pittsburgh Penguins.

But most of the time, the pair revels in its shared personality.

Last year during winter exam period, the two were sitting in DeWolfe, studying for exams and writing tutorial papers. Their desks—of course—were set up so their backs were to each other, otherwise neither would get any work done.

Still, 10 minutes into quiet time, Lannon turned around and asked Welch if he wanted to play a game.

“I had so much work I should have said no, but I was so fired up because I knew he had something good in mind,” Welch says.

And boy did he.

The game was simple. Each person had five minutes to come up with the craziest outfit using only the items in their bedroom. Then, the two would meet and whoever made the other one laugh harder won.

Welch put on two different shoes, 20 different ties and a cowboy hat, but lost because Lannon had wrapped himself in toilet paper and Christmas lights, then plugged himself into the wall.

“Yeah, I think he won,” Welch says.

*****

Watching the two of them together, it’s clear they’ve both won.

They’ve won an ECAC title and twice advanced to the NCAA tournament. Welch may even be a Hobey Baker finalist this season.

They have fun no matter what they do. They laugh all the time, maybe even too much. They are teammates and best friends.

It’s kind of like they are eight-years old all over again. Except now, they get to have sleepovers every night.

—Staff writer Lande A. Spottswood can be reached at spottsw@fas.harvard.edu.