HOCKEY PREVIEW 2006-07: Minding the Net

Brittany Martin has been in this position before.

Last year, Martin was the only goalie to dress for the Harvard women’s hockey team during a crucial mid-season conference series. Martin, a freshman with all of two career starts to her name, responded with the best performance of her career, holding Brown and Yale to a single goal over the course of 130 minutes, as the Crimson tied the Bears and the Bulldogs.

Now, Martin and Harvard are in similar straits.

Martin is charged with minding net for the sixth-ranked Crimson with only junior walk-on Kristin Toretta on the bench as insurance. Freshman Christina Kessler was supposed to enter the program and challenge Martin for the starting job vacated by graduate Ali Boe ’06. But the Canadian rookie injured her knee during a local tournament in early August, tearing the MCL in her knee.

Kessler is slowly resuming hockey activities, but while she continues her rehabilitation, the untested Toretta will serve as the only backup on a team with title aspirations.

“It doesn’t matter who’s behind them,” Martin says. “My team’s going to play well in front of them. I’m just there behind them in case something happens. So I’m their backup.”

To know Martin starred on national roller hockey teams before arriving at Harvard is to get a good idea of Martin’s style in net: she plays with the fearlessness and abandon of an in-liner, often diving way outside the crease to smother loose pucks and getting into the occasional shoving match with an oncoming winger.

“I’m basically a whatever-it-takes kind of person,” Martin says. “It’s just natural. As a goalie, your first instinct is just stop the puck. Don’t let it go in. You don’t want to let your team down.”

For Kessler, a blue-chip recruit from the Toronto area, the injury could not have come at a worse time. She led her under-18 team, the Ontario Red, to the national championship last November, getting named most valuable goaltender of the tournament in the process, and was selected to the country’s under-22 team training camp scheduled for a week before she incurred the knee injury.

“I was pretty disappointed,” Kessler says. “I’m letting pain guide me right now. Hopefully it won’t take too much time to get back. I’ve been off for a pretty long time so I’m really excited to get back on the ice.”

The initial diagnosis, which would have required Kessler to undergo surgery and over six months of recovery, prompted Kessler to consider taking the entire year off.

“I verbally deferred my year with the coaches,” Kessler says, “Because I thought initially that my ACL was torn as well.”

Toretta, a six-foot Connecticut native, made her varsity debut in the third period of the Union game on Oct. 29, preserving Martin’s shutout and making two saves in her 20 minutes of work.

“Kristin Toretta has come back and is doing us a tremendous service and favor playing for us as our back-up now,” Harvard head coach Katey Stone says. “She is doing great and has already improved so much.”

The entire group faces the task of filling Boe’s skates. Boe, a three-year starter and the program’s all-time record holder in shutouts (15) and goals-against average (1.92), directed the Crimson to three straight ECAC tournament titles, back-to-back NCAA Championship games in 2004 and 2005, and the Frozen Eight quarterfinals a year ago.

“Watching her play, seeing how she handled different situations, it taught me a lot,” Martin says. “She put me in a situation now where I think I can fill her shoes and I’m glad to be there.”

When Boe was sidelined with a concussion in early February, then-junior goalie Emily Vitt having left the team several weeks prior, Martin stepped up for the set against Ivy rivals Brown and Yale. She finished the season with 2-2-2 record, 2.28 goals-against average, and .933 save percentage.

The Bears game, for its part, was the first scoreless tie in the history of the program. Goals won’t be as hard to come by this season, thanks in no small part to the return of the squad’s three Olympians—co-captain Julie Chu, sophomore Sarah Vaillancourt, and junior Caitlin Cahow—from year-long absences. Martin also credits the trio with elevating the tenor of practices.

“It just ups everyone’s level of play,” Martin says. “They’re high-caliber players, and having them around pushes you harder. They shoot a little harder, picking on a little more corners and it forces me to be a better goalie too.”

Both Martin and Kessler agree that the better goalie will get the lion’s share of the playing time once Kessler is back to full strength.

“Either way, you’re going to be competitive,” Martin says. “Whether you’re internally competitive with yourself or with other teammates, it’s not going to matter. I’m not going to do anything different.”

“Obviously I expect to play a bit but that will all be determined by how each one of us performs,” Kessler adds. “Whoever rises to the challenge will wind up playing in the end.”

And both have an eye on the bigger picture.

“Basically what you’re doing is preparing for your team to win a national championship,” Martin says.

Now that would be a position Martin has never been in before.

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