NOTEBOOK: Stone Tallies Milestone 300th Win as Harvard Drops Big Green

The No. 1 Harvard women’s hockey team’s 5-1 victory over Dartmouth Saturday afternoon didn’t just punch the Crimson’s ticket to the NCAA Frozen Four.

It also marked a huge milestone for Harvard head coach Katey Stone, who became just the third Division 1 women’s hockey coach to record 300 career victories with the quarterfinal win.

But in typical Stone fashion, the coach downplayed the personal significance of the victory, directing attention to her team’s accomplishments.

“It’s done,” Stone said. “Honestly, if someone hadn’t said something to me about it earlier today, I wouldn’t have known. We don’t think that way in our locker room. We think about the task at hand and stay in the moment, and that goes for everyone involved in the program.”

The fact that the 300th victory propelled the Crimson to Duluth next week, where they will face off against Wisconsin on Thursday evening, was what really mattered.

“You come up to a milestone and it passes,” Stone said. “You can’t really put a whole lot of energy into it because it’s going to come and go one way or the other. Again, today wasn’t about 300 wins, it was solely about our team playing Harvard hockey.”

Even if Stone didn’t put a lot of stock in the accomplishment, her players and fellow coaches took the time to recognize Harvard’s winningest coach after the game.

Tri-captains Laura Brady, Caitlin Cahow, and Brenna McLean presented Stone with flowers in a post-game ceremony, and one of the linesmen made sure that the coach got the puck that led to the special win.

“I got emotional,” Crimson forward Sarah Vaillancourt said. “It was awesome for her, having a great crowd like this, and our team played very well. She definitely deserves it and I’m really impressed. I [hope] I can be a coach like her later on in life.”

“Oh, I think she’s much, much better now than she was when she was at 299,” Big Green coach Mark Hudak joked after the game. “Katey’s done an outstanding job and I’m really, really happy for her in that regard. I wish them the best of luck as they head out to Minnesota.”

Now Stone must prepare to take her team to the Frozen Four, an event that both she and Harvard are very familiar with.

The Crimson has appeared in seven NCAA tournaments, and has now advanced to the semifinals five times. On top of that, Harvard made three straight appearances in the national championship game in 2003-2005, but the team faltered in each.

The NCAA championship has, as of yet, eluded Stone. She led the Crimson to a national championship in the 1999 season, but that was before the NCAA began sponsoring women’s hockey as an official sport. That title was won under the auspices of the now-defunct American Women’s College Hockey Association.

But the 2008 rendition of the Harvard women’s hockey team is special. It’s got speed. It’s got depth. It’s got versatility. And the Crimson is currently just a win away from the 33-1 mark of the 1999 national champions.

“You’ve got some very good players on their team, and if you give them ten opportunities, they’re going to be able to score on two or three of those,” Hudak said. “They have a very good team. They deserve to be #1.”

To reach the top of collegiate women’s hockey, Harvard will first have to exorcise some long-standing demons. The team’s semifinal draw is fifth-seeded Wisconsin, the defending national champions.

Last year, the Crimson took the Badgers to four overtimes before losing a heartbreaker in the quarterfinals, 4-3.

But Stone will go into the game looking for win 301, a win that will be more important to her than No. 300. And she has confidence in her team’s ability to go into hostile territory and come out as the first ECAC school to claim the NCAA title.

“I think that the first place you have to start is how well we play defense and how stingy we are,” Stone said. “We have really good goaltending, we have good players in front of the goaltender, and we work our way up the ice. We make smarter decisions with the puck this year than we have in the past. And then we always talk about how the offense takes care of itself.”

“It’s not a magical recipe,” Stone added. “It’s simply that they work really hard and really smart.”

And on top of that, they have quite the coach heading things up behind the bench.

—Staff writer Kate Leist can be reached at kleist@fas.harvard.edu.