Taking Their Final Shot Together

Many have tried, but few have been able to define just what exactly Harvard hockey represents, encompasses, and signifies. The phrase is tossed around and dropped by members of the program anytime you talk to them, but when asked to describe it in words, few even know where to begin.

As seniors Ashley Banfield and Nicole Corriero made a valiant attempt to capture the meaning, I realized I had found it—not in their description, but in their own personal hockey chronicle. Theirs is a story that can be summed in one simple sentence: this is Harvard women’s hockey.

THE START OF SOMETHING BIG

First impressions aren’t everything. Though they were soon to become the best of friends, Corriero was not immediately receptive to the idea upon seeing Banfield for the first time.

The two were nine years old when Corriero came to her first tryout practice with the Scarborough Sharks, a local Canadian pee-wee team for girls.

“I show up and the coach is like, ‘Hey Bam-Bam, why don’t you demonstrate this drill.’ And this girl with the ugliest helmet I’ve ever seen demonstrates the drill,” Corriero recalls. “I said, ‘Ugh, look at that helmet. Who is that?’ totally just in a snobby, kind of superficial way. I was like I don’t want to work with her.”

“I had this giant visor and I wore it for one day, one practice, and she always talks about it,” Banfield says with a sigh.

While the two didn’t attend school together, they lived some five minutes away from each another in their native Ontario and saw each other often, playing hockey in the Corriero basement that had been furnished for hockey. Designed by Nicholas Corriero, Nicole’s father, the plywood-covered room boasts a shooting range, a net, and a wooden goalie—a prerequisite to their future power plays with Harvard.

Back on the ice, Banfield and Corriero played forward alongside Dartmouth junior Cherie Piper with the Sharks. Donning blue uniforms, the trio had a distinctive look about them.

“Piper’s dad started calling us Smurf because our team was blue, we were all three years younger than the other girls on the team, and we were also just short for our age,” Banfield says. “So we were disproportionately shorter than everyone else in the league.”

But what the trio lacked in size they made up for in skill, leading the Sharks to a provincial title in their first year together.

“Basically, the strategy was on a breakout, get the puck to Piper, and follow her down the ice,” Banfield says. “If she scored, you got the assist. If they took her out of the play, you were wide open and you could score.”

AN OFFER THEY COULDN’T REFUSE

Banfield squared off against Corriero on opposing Team Ontario squads in the 2001 National Championships. Corriero’s team prevailed, but Banfield proved herself a capable defensemen in front of college scouts while playing as a “force-fence,” a hybrid between defense and offense, throughout the game.

“That was the first time anyone from Harvard had seen me play, so they saw me as a forward but recruited me as a defenseman,” Banfield says.

“[It was a] leap of faith,” Corriero adds.

As was their eventual college decision. The two consulted with one another, and while Banfield intended on coming to Harvard, Corriero considered other schools.

“We both got in here and decided it’d be great to go to school together since we know each other, we’ve played together for so long,” Banfield says. “We both just absolutely loved the team here. That was the biggest selling factor—everyone on the team that we had met were so great.”

“There was just something about the players and the school and everything here that just kind of fit,” Corriero says.

Much has changed since their decision, and their progression is evident on the ice.

“I think the biggest difference is when Ashley was younger, she was an active skater, where it wasn’t just about her moving her legs but about her moving every one of her body parts in order to move from point A to point B,” Corriero jokes, “kind of rowing a boat.”

Corriero notes that Ashley’s biggest contribution has been filling the very big skates left by Angela Ruggiero ‘02-’04, both on the ice as a defenseman and off the ice as a leader.

“Ashley’s definitely the smartest defensemen I’ve ever played with. It’s been evident since we were in high school and before,” Corriero says, “but it’s come to be shown more and more in her college career as well. She’s the kind of speaks-least, says-most type of leader. But when she does talk everybody listens because when she goes out on the ice she actualizes what she says and leads by example.”

Just as Banfield has stepped up in ways most did not expect before this season, so too has Corriero had an unpredictable senior year.

“She just really stepped it up, not just breaking the [goals-scored in a season] record. That’s great and all, but defensively she’s become a much stronger player,” Banfield says. “We used to joke that she never went into the defensive zone, and now she’s on the penalty kill doing a tremendous job on the 5-on-3s we’ve had. Her game has gotten tremendously better while she hasn’t lost any of her offensive punch she’s always had.”

Both Corriero and Banfield attribute this increase in production to Corriero’s training and conditioning in the off-season.

“I remember coming in freshmen year and going, ‘whoa, you got a lot bigger.’ She did a lot of lifting over the summer and got really strong,” Banfield says. “She’s gotten a lot faster. Try to knock her off the puck—you can’t.”

While Corriero credits much of her strength to kickboxing and spinning classes, she realizes it didn’t hurt to have Ruggiero as her lifting partner for two years.

“She’d be like, ‘Go on! Smack on another 45,’ and I’d be trying to impress the big Olympian going ‘Yeah! Woo! I’m hardcore,’” Corriero says. “And like I can’t fit into any of my jeans anymore, I’m like dammit!’”

Still, both have found a good fit at Harvard, particularly this season, when as seniors each has posted career numbers—Corriero rivals the nation’s scoring leaders, ranking first in goals (58) and seconds in points per game (2.59), while Banfield ranks second nationally among defensemen for points per game (1.21).

Their increased time playing together on special teams has only increased their overall production.

“There are certain plays we just do an assignment that are kind of unspoken—things off the face-offs and breakouts,” Corriero says. “We’ve just come to the point where we know each other so well that things just kind of pan out in the end.”

THE FINAL FRAME

Four years later, both Banfield and Corriero feel their decision to attend Harvard has paid off in more ways than one, even if they’ve had to overcome their share of adversity.

This season, Banfield quietly emerged as one of the strongest on-ice presences the Crimson possesses while continuing to battle knee injuries that have plagued her throughout her career.

Corriero has seen her share of bumps and bruises as well, but sometimes the biggest blacks and blues appear in print.

Take Wally Kozak’s comments in a March 11 Toronto Star article, “Not Good Enough, Eh?” by Ken Campbell. Kozak, Team Canada’s head scout, criticizes Corriero’s skating abilities, saying, “she would have to literally learn to skate” in order to be considered by the team.

Having played with her for over 10 years, Banfield doesn’t buy that argument.

“People talk about her skating all the time but if you’re going up against her, you can’t get the puck from her,” she says. “Whether she’s moving 100 miles per hour or 50 miles per hour, it’s impossible to take the puck from her.”

On the bright side, Corriero has only received the criticism because of the outstanding season she and the team have had, after what can only be described as a dismal November.

“To be honest, we didn’t really know how to deal,” Corriero says. “We had never lost so much in so little period of time. There have been teams that lost six games in a span of three years, [but] one month?”

After starting the season with a shaky 6-1-1 record, the Crimson lost four in a row to the biggest guns out west—Wisconsin and Minnesota once, and twice to Minnesota-Duluth. The team finished 2004 7-6-1, leaving critics skeptical at best at their chances to make a repeat appearance in the Frozen Four.

But Harvard only grew stronger.

“It was so good to have Christmas break and go and have our time off,” Corriero says. “When we got back Coach worked us so hard. That alone brought us together as a team.”

The work paid off. The Crimson boasts the longest unbeaten streak in the nation at 20 games, going undefeated in 2005 with an 18-0-2 record.

“We made a conscious decision that this year will be better, we’re going to go undefeated in 2005,” Banfield says. “Looking back to November when no one thought we would make it this far, when everyone was turning their heads and laughing if you ever thought Harvard was making the NCAA tournament. And we proved them wrong. And that’s what our team is about—thriving in challenge.”

It’s that element of Harvard hockey—facing adversity head-on—that both Banfield and Corriero fully embody. Along with tri-captain Kat Sweet and seniors Ali Crum and Sarah Holbrook, they were initiated into Harvard hockey via trial by ordeal, seeing more action than usual their freshmen season when the Olympians took the year off to train.

The next season, they dutifully took role-player positions, ceding to the returning players for the good of the team. Corriero posted 62 points—second in the nation—her freshman year, only to see a drop in her own output as that of the team’s rose.

But when the Crimson was looking for an answer on offense this season, Corriero didn’t just rise to the occasion—she soared to new heights.

And how does she react to being left off the list of three Kazmaier finalists?

“I never thought I’d win the award so to be put in the top three is an unneeded distraction for us at the point,” Corriero says.

The most important thing for us is winning this weekend and winning the next two games after that,” she adds. “If it might be a hindrance to that, then I don’t want it.”

It might seem strange to some, or even a bit insincere, but both Banfield and Corriero are genuine about their loyalty to Harvard, because intertwined with that loyalty is their long friendship, as well as those with their teammates.

“There’s something amazing about Harvard hockey that the team lives on beyond the season and beyond even graduation,” Corriero says. “Harvard hockey is more than just a bunch of people playing hockey together. It’s an attitude. It’s a family. It’s just so awesome to be a part of.”

Without competing allegiances to national or Olympic teams, these final games are likely the last in the playing careers of Banfield and Corriero.

Having gone through it all, there’s nothing either the two would have done differently.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Corriero says. “That’s why I’m able to come to the decision that this is probably my last year of hockey. It’s the perfect end to a pretty fine career.”

—Staff writer John R. Hein can be reached at hein@fas.harvard.edu.