Trial By Fire

In his third season with the Harvard men’s hockey team, junior defenseman Noah Welch has already drawn accolades for his play, both from ECAC coaches and from others around the country.

Recently retired Vermont coach Mike Gilligan said Welch was one of the best college defensemen he had seen. Boston College coach Jerry York said that Welch “is developing into one of the top rear guards in the country.” And at the end of last season, Welch was named a second team All-American by a national vote.

Despite those accolades from opposing coaches and nation-wide recognition, Welch has struggled at times with his role as the Crimson’s defensive leader, and many of those slips have been magnified by the highly publicized nature of the games they came in.

Puck Awareness

Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni lauds Welch’s quickness, long reach, and physical play in the defensive zone, a combination that does not always go together. Listed at 6’4 and 212 lbs., Welch has the size to out-muscle nearly every forward who crosses his blue line. What is unusual is to have that strength and size combined with his skating ability.

“Noah is a big guy who can move,” Mazzoleni said. “He can close on people with his feet, take away their space on defense.”

Welch’s ability to take away a forward’s position is highlighted by his battles with Dartmouth’s hulking left-wing Hugh Jessiman, Maine’s diminutive spark plug Martin Kariya, and BC’s quick-skating Ben Eaves.

Mazzoleni purposely matches Welch against Jessiman, believing that his All-American defenseman has the size necessary to move the 6’5 Jessiman off the puck. And against smaller, faster forwards like Eaves and Kariya, Welch uses his long reach to poke the puck away before those players can maneuver too far into the Harvard end. His play against Kariya and the rest of Maine’s talented forwards impressed Black Bear coach Tim Whitehead.

“Welch is great, he’s outstanding,” Whitehead said. “His poise with the puck, his strength on the puck. He’s very defensively aware. I think he’s a very good player.”

Falling Down

But before his success against BC or Maine, Welch suffered his first setback of last season in Ithaca. While most Harvard fans were watching the Harvard-Yale football game, the hockey team had traveled to upstate New York to face rival Cornell.

Trailing the favored Big Red 2-1 early in the second period, Welch fell flat on the ice, freeing up Cornell forward Greg Hornby for an easy point-blank goal that junior goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris could not stop.

Grumet-Morris, though, did not see the trip up as a major incident, noting that, “when you log a lot of minutes, you’re more likely to make a mistake,” Grumet-Morris said.

And the rest of Welch’s teammates felt the same way.

“I do get a lot of ice time, but [the fall against Cornell] was a freak thing,” Welch said. “But I went back to the bench and the guys were supportive. We were laughing about it later.”

While the play obviously hurt in the context of the Crimson’s eventual loss to a major rival, the occasional on-ice fall is a common error—even great skaters stumble on a fairly regular basis. Still, it represented a temporary setback in Welch’s steadily improving reputation in hockey circles.

Stepping in the Right Direction

Welch has consistently improved over the past two-plus seasons. He earned a spot on the ECAC All-Rookie team his freshman year and garnered second-team All-Conference and second-team All-American honors a year ago. On September 22, he was named a pre-season All-ECAC team selection for this season. None of that improvement comes as a surprise to Mazzoleni.

“Noah took a very strong step forward from freshman to sophomore year and I think he will make a similar jump from sophomore to junior year,” he said. “He has the ability to control a game, and he needs to do that consistently now.”

“He’s even more of a dominant presence this year than last,” Grumet-Morris agreed. “His ability to control a defensive zone and to take over on the power play have increased exponentially.”

“He’s one of the marked players on the ice. He’s a difference maker.”

And those expectations add a lot of pressure onto Welch’s shoulders, something he struggled to accept at first.

“I put a lot of pressure on myself this summer, being an All-American last year on the second team,” Welch said. “I almost came into the season thinking I had to be at least a second-team All-American this year, or a first team. If I wasn’t a first team All-American then I wasn’t improved. I realized, luckily a week before the season, that’s not true. And if that’s my mentality, it’s only going to hurt me and the team.”

Benched

One way in which Welch has occasionally hurt the team is with penalties; he has struggled to avoid time in the box every year he has been at Harvard, and his penalty minute total is one of the highest on the team each year.

Nothing exemplifies this more explicitly than the penalty Welch took in the season opener against Brown. With the Crimson already penalized for having too many men on the ice, Welch took a cross-checking penalty 20 seconds in, giving the Bears 1:40 of a five-on-three advantage. That led to a Brown power play goal off the stick of Cory Caouette and led to Welch watching the next game against Vermont in a suit.

“This year, to be honest with you, I got off to a real slow start,” Welch said. “In the Brown game, I didn’t play my game and getting benched the second game kinda threw me off a little bit.”

The cross-checking penalty excepted, Mazzoleni feels that many of Welch’s penalties come from trying to do too much on the ice.

“With Noah, at times when our team needs a major boost or is struggling, he puts it all on his own shoulders,” Mazzoleni said.

“He may try to do too much,” he continued. “And you gotta respect someone for that, but if you work with the people around you, you can be more effective.”

“And sometimes [putting it all on his shoulders] has worked for Noah. He’s made great individual plans, and made some big things happen.”

One of the things that did happen was a jump in Welch’s scoring. Limited by injuries his freshman year, Welch finished the season with only 11 points. But last season, Welch emerged as the team’s fifth-leading scorer, tallying six goals and 22 assists.

However, by showing that he’s not afraid to sit his All-American, Mazzoleni sent a message to his team and his defensive star about the importance of not committing penalties.

“It was the first time in my hockey career that I’ve gotten benched, and it was definitely a humbling experience,” Welch said. “That’s something that makes me stronger as a player.”

“I have a role that I need to go out and play, and that’s what I’m focused on, and I think all the other stuff will take care of itself.”

Beanpot Bungle

Part of focusing is the ability to forget. Last February, Harvard faced cross-town rival BU in the opening round of the Beanpot. With the score knotted at 1-1, and more than twelve minutes gone by in the final frame, Welch had a golden opportunity to give Harvard the lead.

Skating into the BU end on a two-on-one break, sophomore Charlie Johnson drew the attention of Terrier defenseman Ryan Whitney and goaltender Sean Fields and then fired a sharp pass to Welch on the left side of the ice. With a wide-open look at the net, Welch launched a shot from the top of the crease but was denied a goal on a brilliant kick-save by Fields. BU went on to score a goal just over a minute later, giving the Terriers a 2-1 win and leaving Welch to wonder ‘what if?’.

“Honestly it makes you stronger—missing that shot [against BU] and falling up at Cornell last year—stuff like that you’ve got to just laugh about and shake off,” Welch said.

“The Beanpot one stung bad because I realized if I had put that home, we win that game and then we go to the finals, first time Harvard has been there in a while. Plus the Beanpot is so big, being a local guy. So that one stung a lot.”

“Honestly, two days later I think it made the Top Ten plays on ESPN, that’s the first time I’ve been on ESPN. That’s just something you’ve got to laugh about.”

But as important as being able to laugh at your slip-ups is the ability to remain positive—and to be poised if a similar spot arises again.

“Next time I’m put in that situation, I’ll be confident that I’ll put it home,” Welch said.

“If you let the criticism get to you and bring you down, then you beat yourself there. You’re always going to get criticized as an athlete,” he added.

Part of that criticism is simply the nature of sports and of Welch’s role as a high-profile player—something his coach understands.

“For the one play he struggled with, he made 20 great plays,” Mazzoleni said. “Sometimes people forget the 20 or 30 things he does right every night.”

Thoughts Best Left to Summer

But some people are paying attention, including the scouts who come to see him play on many nights during the season.

Welch, like many of his teammates, has been taken in the NHL Draft. Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in the second round of the 2001 Draft, he represents the highest pick (54th overall) on the Harvard roster.

And Welch’s play through two seasons has impressed the people who hope to one day be his employers.

“Obviously he was a very high draft choice, and we’re very happy to have him in the organization,” said the late Herb Brooks, former Pittsburgh Penguins’ Director of Player Development and coach of the 1980 Gold-Medal winning ‘Miracle on Ice’ team. “He has the size, the skating ability, the decision making.”

Welch has come to realize that he possesses many of the skills needed for the NHL.

“It’s great when you see guys that you’ve skated with like Dom Moore ’03 playing up in the Show and doing well,” he said. “In a way I’m real close, but in another way I’m so far.”

A part of that distance from the NHL is personally enforced; fantasies about skating in the same sweater as the Lemieuxs and the Jagrs of the world are a diversion best reserved for the summer, otherwise it would be too distracting.

“The prospect of playing in the pros does have an effect on you,” Welch admitted. “I made a promise to myself not to think about it because that leads to you putting yourself before the team.

Learning From Experience

Putting himself before the team is certainly not something Welch wants to do. He mentioned his benching preemptively, listing it along with the Beanpot and Cornell as one of the things that have humbled him.

And perhaps it’s a good thing that occasionally—maybe once a season—Welch is humbled on the ice. It would be far too easy to get a swelled head as a result of all the adjectives and exclamations that are generally directed his way, however justified they are.

“He is a premier defenseman at the Division I level, and an offensive catalyst for our team,” Mazzoleni said. “He’s going to be someone who can dominate at both ends of the rink. He hasn’t touched all of his abilities yet. He’s a difference maker.”

Welch has made his mistakes—but more importantly, he’s turned them into a learning experience. And Harvard hockey is better for it.

“If there’s 60 teams in college hockey, there’s 59 other ones that’d love to have Noah Welch on their team,” Mazzoleni said. “We’re very fortunate to have him here.”

—Staff writer Timothy M. McDonald can be reached at tmcdonal@fas.harvard.edu.