Stone Returns Home to Alma Mater UNH With Championship Aspirations

They say home is where the heart is.

For Harvard women’s hockey head coach Katey Stone, home is also where the trophy is.

Having brought her team back from the brink of collapse to qualify for this weekend’s NCAA Frozen Four, Stone will lead the Crimson into Durham, N.H. for a national semifinal date with St. Lawrence tonight. Durham is home to the University of New Hampshire, where Stone was a two-sport star and captain of both the hockey and lacrosse teams in the late ’80s.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” Stone said. “To have the opportunity to play for a national championship at your alma mater, your campus, is certainly an exciting and proud moment for me.”

It is a relatively simple path that carried Stone from her days in skates with the Wildcats to a spot behind the bench at Harvard’s helm. Coaching, in many ways, is in Stone’s blood. Her father was a fixture at the Taft School, serving as the long-time athletic director. Her oldest brother Mike, is the head baseball coach at the University of Massachusetts, her brother Jim serves as the AD at Blair Academy in New Jersey, and her sister Kelly works at the ECAC.

“My family, we’re a family of coaches,” Stone said. “It’s kind of the family business so I think that’s what inspired me initially.”

Stone expects her clan to be out in force to cheer her and the Crimson on this weekend.

“I’m going to end up having more family there this weekend than anybody else,” Stone said. “It’s kind of an event these games for my family.”

Stone’s natural coaching instincts have directed Harvard back from the brink into peak form entering this weekend. When the team faced its most difficult stretch back in December, Stone knew just the right buttons to press to get it back into championship-caliber form in the 2005. The Crimson limped into winter vacation having dropped five of six against and stood at 7-6-1 overall with its post-season prospects dimming by the day.

“I think a lot of people didn’t think we would get to this point,” Stone said. “So it’s just a great lesson for our kids: if you jump in the deep end and get yourselves going, anything is possible.”

As the critics wrote off Harvard’s chances, Stone placed renewed emphasis on discipline and conditioning, pushing her skaters doubly hard in practice, training them to achieve the strength and speed they would need against college hockey’s toughest competition.

“Every Monday, our favorite part of Mondays is five-minute skate time,” senior tri-captain Nicole Corriero said sarcastically of Stone’s new training regimen. “It’s just five minutes of pure skating—sprinting and rest for a bit. It’s a lot of fun.”

This fundamentals-first approach to coaching hockey is something Stone learned from her skipper at UNH.

“My coach in college, Russ McCurdy, he was a great fundamentalist,” Stone said. “He taught the game in the simplest way but emphasized the importance of fundamentals and conditioning and discipline and that’s how I’ve tried to tailor my coaching style.”

Since Stone upped the intensity of the workouts and called on her players for personal accountability and responsibility, the Crimson hasn’t dropped a single game. Stone wheels her squad into Durham tonight hoping to extend its 20-game unbeaten streak (18-0-2) for just two more contests.

“It’s going to take two great hockey games,” Stone said. “They’re going to be different and each period’s going to be a bit different and we’re going to have to find a way to win.”

Harvard will need all of its newfound endurance and more when it takes the ice at New Hampshire’s Whittemore Center, a rink—at 100 feet in width—about 10 feet wider than the Crimson is used to.

“All four teams have not played on a big sheet all year,” Stone said. “We’re all in the same boat and it’ll test to see how everyone adjusts to it.”

The rink at the Whittemore Center, however, opened as a state-of-the-art arena in 1995, is not the exact one Stone played on.

“When I played it was Snively Arena, so it’s a bit different,” Stone said. “It’s not the same deal as if you’re going back to where you played.”

The ice is not the only thing that has changed in 16 years. At 226 victories, Stone is the winningest coach in Harvard history and the one of only three to reach the 200-win plateau in Division I history.

This season, Stone is looking for a new crown to add to her mantelpiece, already adorned with the 1999 AWCHA national championship from a squad that posted a remarkable 33-1 record and knocked off New Hampshire in the title game.

Without the same number of weapons as some years past, and given the adversity the Crimson was forced to overcome in the early going, many observers consider this season Stone’s finest coaching effort.

“Kids have to respond to coaches and these kids answered the call when I asked them to,” Stone said. “And I think that’s the reason why we’ve had the success we’ve had in 2005.”

She was honored with the ECAC Coach of the Year Award, picking up her third Ivy League title, fourth ECAC regular season crown, third ECAC tournament title, and seventh Beanpot.

With a little home cooking, Stone just might add an NCAA championship to her resume.

—Staff writer Jonathan Lehman can be reached at jlehman@fas.harvard.edu.