Old Friends Meet as Foes in First Round of Tourney

Sara Smith has certainly watched her share of hockey games. But she was downright baffled by what she saw last Friday.

All night, Sara witnessed her brother, Harvard captain Kenny Smith, trade body checks with one of his closest friends, Vermont forward Art Femenella.

Smith is 6’2, 215 pounds. Femenella (6’7, 248) is college hockey’s Gheorghe Muresan. These were not love taps.

But there the towering men stood after the 6-4 UVM victory, helmets off, smiling, with arms around each other as Smith’s mother snapped photographs.

Minutes later, more players who had hacked and whacked at each other all night talked near the exit doors of Bright Hockey Center.

“How can you do that?” Sara asked Kenny. “How can you guys run into each other all over the ice, talk trash, then be best friends afterward?”

The captain shrugged. “That’s hockey,” he replied.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can’t get enough of it. As a result of its popular-but-not-that-popular nature, college hockey inspires a blissful cult following. And the players—many of whom left Mom and Dad for a year or more during high school to chase their dreams—are part of the sport’s charm.

Smith and Femenella, for example, are from different states but have known each other since 1998, when they were 17 and playing in the U.S. National Team Developmental Program in Ann Arbor, Mich.

They were fast friends and still are today. Femenella has visited the Smith cabin in Groton, Vt., about eight times. And last summer, Smith went to New Jersey for the wedding of Femenella’s sister. “That,” Smith said, “was a blast.”

Smith also hosted what you might call the Stanley Cup of gatherings at his cabin last summer: the entire Harvard men’s team, Femenella and his boys from Jersey, Smith’s buddies from his hometown of Stoneham, and Vermont forward Brady Leisenring, another of Smith’s good friends from his days in Ann Arbor.

“Hockey’s a small world,” Leisenring said.

Everybody really does know everybody—and everybody knows there’s nothing better than flipping your buddy over the boards. Or, better yet, giving him a couple haymakers for the ride home.

“If there was fighting in college hockey,” Smith said, he and Femenella “would’ve squared off right at center ice. Then we’d sit around the campfire and talk about it all summer.”

(Insert a Tim Allen-inspired grunt here.)

Seriously, though, you have to think hockey would’ve gone over well with the Anglo Saxons and their mead-hall crowd. There is something special about this game, truly a gentleman’s sport. Men (and women) pulverize one another with sticks while adhering (most of the time) to an honor code that is equal parts law-bound and unspoken.

Then they shake hands.

“What happens on the ice,” Leisenring said, “stays on the ice.”

It’s fairly common for ECAC hockey players to see familiar faces on the opposition. Though it’s not to the same extent it was 25 (or even 15) years ago, a fair number of league players come from New England prep schools.

Again, consider the Harvard-Vermont match-up, which will see another renewal in tonight’s playoff opener at Bright. Harvard senior Tim Pettit and sophomore Peter Hafner both played at The Taft School, as did Vermont’s Ben Driver, Tim Plant, Travis Russell and Jaime Sifers.

Hafner, Driver, Russell and Sifers all graduated from Taft in 2002 and were very close friends during their time there. “You couldn’t imagine a nicer kid than Peter Hafner, just so genuine,” said Sifers, who also played alongside Hafner on Taft’s lacrosse team. “We did the same sports, the same seasons, the same workouts. We were together all the time.”

All that changed, of course, when Hafner came to Cambridge and Sifers headed north. That became even clearer in the first period of Harvard’s visit to Vermont last season, when Hafner—with a six-inch height advantage—caught Sifers with his shoulder, opening a cut on his friend’s chin.

Sifers left the game to get stitched up but returned soon afterward. He let Hafner hear it. “He was jawing at me the rest of the game,” Hafner recalled, laughing. “He’s not everyone’s best friend on the ice, but off the ice, he’s an excellent guy.”

Sifers knew Pettit as a hockey and lacrosse teammate—not to mention his hall monitor during his sophomore year. Sifers vividly remembers one practice that year when he was defending Pettit and made the mistake of watching the puck rather than playing the body. Pettit deftly pushed the puck through Sifers’s legs. “He burned me,” Sifers admitted.

Taft coach Mike Maher then asked Sifers if he had at least gotten a good look at the puck. Sifers said yes. Nevertheless, Maher made Sifers skate for the last hour of practice with a puck inside his helmet cage. “It’s funny now,” Sifers said, “but it wasn’t funny then.”

Tonight, Sifers will go up against his old teammates again. The stakes are much higher, even though the players are the same. “Timmy Pettit hasn’t changed a bit,” Sifers said. “His slapshot is still ridiculous.”

It’s hard to wax nostalgic now, with every team in the ECAC playing to keep its season alive, but there is little doubt that the bonds forged at ages 16 and 17 are still meaningful, regardless of school colors.

Harvard senior assistant captain Rob Fried, for example, has kept tabs on Oriel McHugh, his teammate for two years at Deerfield Academy. McHugh, whom Fried described as having a “quiet intensity about him,” has become one of the league’s better defensive defensemen and is the Catamounts’ captain. “It’s just great to see how he’s gone up in the UVM program,” Fried said.

Yet, if Fried finds himself in the corner with McHugh tonight—or vice versa—no one has any illusions about what will happen. Same goes for all the others—except for Femenella, who sustained a season-ending injury last weekend at Brown.

“You’re enemies on the ice,” Sifers said, “and best friends off it.”

And that, as Harvard’s captain says, is hockey.

HANSON RECOVERING

Those relationships from team to team and player to player are never more evident than in trying times. Most recently, the tightness of the college hockey community has been demonstrated in the three weeks since Vermont goaltender Matt Hanson fractured his fourth cervical vertebrae.

Hanson sustained the injury during a Feb. 12 practice and underwent surgery soon afterward. The Catamounts visited him at his home in Peabody on their way to last Friday’s game at Bright, and he was in attendance—standing and walking under his own—during his team’s 6-4 win.

He chatted with numerous people during the game, including Crimson sophomore Dan Murphy, a North Andover native who played five seasons of youth hockey with Hanson and was a friend of his growing up.

“He seemed pretty upbeat about his recovery,” Murphy said. “He’s got about nine months of recovery ahead of him, but the doctors say he can play hockey again.

“He was talking really quietly. He’s still a little weak and that was his first time being out, but he looked good and he’s walking. Ninety percent of the people who have his injury end up in a wheelchair, so he’s doing something right.”

Fried played with Hanson at Deerfield and remembers him as “quite a character.”

“Everyone knows him and everyone loves him,” Fried said. “We’re all glad to see him back on his feet.”

NOAH BALBOA?

Yet another storyline to this weekend’s playoff series is the altercation that occurred between Sifers and Harvard junior defenseman Noah Welch at 14:59 of the first period last Friday.

Almost immediately after Jeff Miles scored to tie the game 1-1, a scrum took place around the Harvard goal, with Sifers and Welch the primary pugilists.

Welch insisted the altercation was “nothing against” Sifers personally. “He’s their team leader, and I consider myself one of the leaders on our team, and I didn’t like some of the stuff that was going on in the game,” Welch said. “Everyone’s trying to blow this up as a Sifers-Welch thing, but it’s just that he’s wearing the ‘C’ now.”

Specifically, Welch was responding to what he said was a deliberate butt-end to Pettit that went uncalled earlier in the period. Pettit retaliated and was sent to the box for hitting after the whistle.

“The whole team saw it, and we didn’t like it,” Welch said. “In college hockey, you have a lot of fake tough guys because there’s no fighting, so you can get away with a lot of stuff, and that was a blatant butt-end. I thought they were gaining confidence from a couple of cheap shots, and after they scored the goal, Sifers was kind of yapping, so I decided to do something about it.”

Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni benched Welch the following night. Welch didn’t fault him for it. “Coach Mazzoleni has been consistent all year in sitting people when they take a poor penalty, and he saw that as a poor penalty, so he sat me,” Welch said.

Welch said he expected to see less chippy play this weekend because of the high stakes. “Our team hasn’t even thought about it,” he said. “This weekend is all about winning.”

Meanwhile, Sifers, a sophomore captain, acknowledged that the tension between him and Welch “might” carry over into this weekend. “Things always get stuck in the back of your head,” he said. “I’m not going to take a penalty against him, or try not to, at least, but if tensions rise and we meet, I wouldn’t be surprised if words were exchanged. But that’s playoff hockey, and hockey in general. It’s all part of the game. After the game, you’re gentlemen about it.

“Noah’s a great player, and it’s some of the strategy of the game to get under the skin of the other team’s best players. Sometimes that carries over...That’s probably not going through his mind right now, and I know it’s not going through mine. But if tensions do rise, we know that’s part of the game.”

—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.