Stellar Season Ends for Hockey

T. S. Eliot may have believed that April is the cruelest month, but hundreds of collegiate athletes would disagree. While March brings madness, it also brings heartbreak for nearly every team in the country.

The Harvard women’s hockey team is no stranger to March heartache. It has made runs to the national championship game and been stopped on the doorstep of the NCAA field. But each of the last nine Marches has brought the same thing—a season-ending playoff loss.

This season was no exception for the Crimson. After being bounced in the ECAC semifinals by Clarkson, Harvard held on for home-ice advantage in the NCAA quarterfinals.

On a quiet campus on the eve of spring break, the Crimson welcomed Cornell to Bright Hockey Center in a game that pitted an established powerhouse against an upstart squad making its first tournament appearance.

This time, it was Cinderella’s turn to shine. The Big Red jumped out to a 5-0 lead, cruised to a 6-2 win, and carried that momentum into triple overtime of the national title game before finally falling to Minnesota-Duluth.

And so again the Harvard women’s hockey team headed into spring break a little earlier than it had hoped, with the bitter taste of a loss left to stew until next season.

Because that’s the funny thing about March—it has a way of making a five-month season about just three or four games. And while March wasn’t kind to the Crimson this year, the 2010 season is still a body of work that Harvard should be proud of.

If in October you had told me that the Crimson would only play six games with both junior Liza Ryabkina and senior Christina Kessler on the ice and still be one of the nation’s top four teams come March, I would have called you crazy. Of course, if you had told me that Cornell would make the national championship game, I probably would have laughed in your face.

It was a season of surprises in women’s hockey, as three teams made their first-ever NCAA tournament appearances, while three traditional powerhouses—including defending national champion Wisconsin—were absent from the field. But for Harvard, although it again found itself near the top of the ECAC and the national field, there were plenty of pleasant surprises as well.

“Yes, we have a young team, but we didn’t play young—very rarely do we play young,” Crimson coach Katey Stone said after the Cornell loss. “We were banged up at times, but we didn’t play banged up. We were in holes before, and we didn’t play like we were in a hole.”

The biggest of these surprises was the emergence of freshman Laura Bellamy, who was thrust into the net in January when a torn ACL abruptly ended Kessler’s career. Bellamy came into her own down the stretch, finishing with a 1.68 goals-against average and a .921 save percentage in 17 starts.

The highlight of the freshman’s season came in the Beanpot, where she didn’t allow a goal in Harvard’s title run and was named the tournament’s best goaltender. And though Bellamy was lit up in her first NCAA appearance—allowing five goals in a period and a half before being lifted in favor of junior Kylie Stephens—the experience the rookie gained this season puts both her and the Crimson light years ahead of where they thought they would be come next October.

Instead of having an inexperienced netminder to open the season, Harvard will be bringing back a seasoned goalie with playoff experience—an enormous advantage in a league full of strong goaltenders.

Bellamy’s classmates made an impact as well. Defensemen Josephine Pucci and Kelsey Romatoski proved themselves early and often and will be asked to step up to anchor the unit next season.

But most impressive was center Jillian Dempsey, a former U.S. Under-18 national team skater who lived up to the hype in her freshman season. The rookie was 10th in the nation in first-year scoring, racking up 27 points on 11 goals and 16 assists.

It helped that Dempsey spent a good chunk of the year playing alongside juniors Kate Buesser and Ryabkina, who seamlessly stepped into the role of offensive leaders.

After returning from a dislocated knee on Nov. 25, Ryabkina made the most of her abbreviated season by scoring 15 goals in her 24 games—including a four-game outburst in the Beanpot opener that reminded fans of the winger’s mentor, two-time Olympian Sarah Vaillancourt ’08-’09.

Buesser, on the other hand, came into her own in her third season, quietly scoring 40 points as she came up in the clutch time and time again.

With an experienced junior class that includes Ryabkina, Buesser, and blueliner Leanna Coskren ready to step up and lead a team full of potential next season, the future of Crimson hockey looks bright.

But the efforts of this year's seniors in helping Harvard reach this point cannot be undervalued. Co-captains Kathryn Farni and Cori Bassett, along with classmates Kessler, Randi Griffin, and Anna McDonald, took a team that could have made excuses and turned it into a squad that perhaps exceeded expectations.

“We just have to play the best we can with the cards we’re dealt,” Farni said after the Cornell game. “There were definitely points in the season where we struggled with the adversity that we had, and I think we tried our best to regroup and were focused on what happens on the ice and what was under our control.”

That’s exactly what the senior class did, leading by example as Bassett, Farni, Griffin, and McDonald each came up with her highest point total in a Crimson uniform. Kessler, meanwhile, finishes her career as the all-time Harvard leader in wins and shutouts while holding the NCAA career mark for save percentage (.941).

Of course, it helps when you have the NCAA’s all-time winningest coach behind the bench—which is what Katey Stone became with her squad’s 5-1 win in the ECAC tournament opener. Now the only thing missing from Stone’s illustrious trophy case is an NCAA title.

With the madness of women’s hockey over for this March, the Crimson has a lot to smile about: a Beanpot crown, a return to the national tournament, and a strong foundation for next season. Although it won’t lace up the skates until October, the beginning of Harvard’s next title run doesn’t seem so far away.

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