There are always a few scheduling quirks to a college hockey season.
Teams can wind up on an extended road trip somewhere along the line, or they might play a few extra games at home. Some other team’s scheduling requirements might necessitate a single game in the middle of the week, and the ever-present butterfly effect can force someone into playing the same opponent twice in three weeks while not seeing another team for months on end.
One team somehow always ends up as the winner, but while front runners are usually teams playing without a conference or a regular home building, Dartmouth, a team with a beautiful home arena and steady conference membership, didn’t top the list.
So maybe that’s why it’s so strange that last weekend’s five-point series against Brown and Yale was the only time the Big Green will play conference games at Thompson Arena for the 2022 portion of their season.
“It’s going to get heavy,” said Dartmouth coach Reid Cashman of the team’s first half. “I played for [Quinnipiac head coach] Rand Pecknold, and he used to say that you can’t win the league or win a championship in October or November, but you can certainly lose it. I’ve always thought about that since Rand’s always done a good job with Quinnipiac getting off to good starts, so to the point, having two Ivy League opponents come into our building with us getting five out of six points is extremely critical.”
There really isn’t a concrete reason why Dartmouth is playing so many road games at the start of the year, but it’s not difficult to infer or draw conclusions around some of the circumstances. The opening weekend game at Harvard was a single matchup in Cambridge because the return match at home in February is scheduled around the Crimson’s participation in the Beanpot, and the Big Green are part of the Friendship Four in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where they are scheduled to play Quinnipiac in a non-league game.
That meant four games against Quinnipiac, Princeton, Clarkson, and St. Lawrence needed to move into the second half of the season, and an extra home game against Harvard had to be played on the Friday before the Beanpot championship. The Crimson additionally scheduled a game against Quinnipiac on the Friday before the semifinal matchup against Boston College, which is customary to avoid playing two league games on either weekend flanking the Beanpot, but a single game for Harvard meant a more local team would have to play in that weekend series.
That it wound up at home was a supreme effect from Princeton’s requirement that Jan. 6 and Jan. 7 include home games at Baker Rink for the 100th anniversary celebration of the arena. With its pair of doubleheaders of women’s and men’s hockey, February 3 and 4 became a home series for Dartmouth.
Combined with an eventual bye week, Dartmouth’s only road games after Jan. 7 are at Brown and Yale before it finishes the season with a trip to the North Country to play Clarkson and St. Lawrence. Seven straight games across four different weekends are at Thompson Arena, which coupled with the team’s annual game against Vermont and the Ledyard Classic holiday tournament, meant the Big Green had three games and two conference games at home between the start of the season and the New Year’s holiday.
It also meant taking a 6-0 win from Yale and a shootout win from Brown after coming from behind twice in a 2-2 tie were about as critical as it got for the first half of the season.
“We worked really hard during the last week of practice because of our disappointment [with the opening weekend],” Cashman said. “We spent a lot of time talking about our expectations and our foundation, how we expect our team to play. We got out to Yale and in the first period, I think we almost tried too hard because we were gripping our sticks so tight. Things just weren’t connecting. But after the first, we just said to take a breath and believe in what we’d done with our work to go play some hockey. Then Luke Haymes scores a goal in the first three minutes, and we took a breath and gained some confidence that snowballed from there.”
Haymes scored twice against Yale and bookended the day with both the first and final goals of a six-goals shutout, and he later tied the Brown game with a late first period goal on the power play. It was his second power play goal of the weekend and helped elevate Dartmouth in a stickier game against the Bears, who scored early in the first period after the Big Green went down a man. Later in the third period, Braiden Dorfman’s second goal of the weekend tied things again before Joey Musa hit the third and final shootout shot to take the extra point and push the team into an early fifth place slot in the ECAC standings.
“We’re still figuring out where we’re at,” Cashman said. “We’re putting young guys in a position to succeed, but to their credit, they’ve worked really hard to stay in those spots and play those minutes. We’re happy with the way our sophomores came out, and Matthew Hubbarde was one of our best players against Brown [despite not scoring a point].”
Dartmouth now heads to Union and RPI for this weekend’s series in the Capital District before a bye week sends the Big Green to Belfast. They’ll return to play at Cornell and Colgate before hosting UMass Lowell in their remaining first half home game on December 9, two days before the road game at Vermont.
