Mike Harder looked at his bench during Colgate’s weekend series against Cornell with the realization of how deeply injuries impacted his roster.
He was without skaters on his top lines or his special teams, and the Big Red’s vaunted defense made it exceptionally hard to prepare for those individualized situations before the team’s MASH unit accumulated a couple of extra hits in Friday’s game.
By the time Saturday rolled around, a loss to the Big Red already pushed the Raiders to the brink of their first scoreless weekend in conference play, and just like that, the potential first-place team in ECAC Hockey looked more like it was limping into semester break, both literally and figuratively.
That’s when Harder decided to convert his team into a MacGyver experiment.
In a back-and-forth game at Class of 1965 Arena, a crowd teeming with 2,222 maroon-clad fans watched a power play form from the simplest mentality in the coaching handbook. Cornell had spent the end of the second period and start of the third period eradicating a two-goal deficit to tie Colgate at 3-3, but with a five-minute major assessed to the charging Big Red, Harder called for two big bodies to stand in front of the net while other skaters shot from outside.
Traffic, he thought, would help something filter through, and both Michael Neumeier and Reid Irwin offered prophetic outcomes by advantageously scoring goals before Cornell’s box emptied. Boosted back to a two-goal lead, the Raiders added an empty net goal and showed exactly why the team entered its Christmas break in a wide open league’s first place position.
“It’s been great and a huge reward for guys who played through some [tough] things,” said Harder. “And it feels good [to enter break in first place]. We were picked [fifth], but right now, we know that if we take our foot off the gas in January, we’re going to find ourselves fall quickly off the top floor. If you’re not careful in this league, which is so tight, every game can become so huge. It’s been nice to have this stretch, but now we have to keep it going.”
Colgate is battle-tested enough to understand that first place carries a giant target to a league continuing to burst into wide-open parity. Bygone days of a one-team or two-team race no longer exist, but the Raiders found their way to the top of the table by managing their roster through extended hardship producing a single win in the first three weekends of their season. They defeated and drew Sacred Heart at home and bookended the weekend with sweep losses to UConn and UMass Lowell, but a pair of wins at Atlantic Hockey America’s RIT seemingly righted the ship just in time for league play.
It didn’t hurt that Colgate finally consistently played games in Hamilton, a nominally inaccessible place compared to the metropolis locations in ECAC’s eastern flank. The 5-3 win over Brown on the Bears’ first weekend helped jumpstart a stretch of eight points in four games that continued into a six-point sweep at home over Princeton and Quinnipiac after a five-point weekend at Harvard and Dartmouth, the surprise initial leader in the conference’s Pairwise Rankings clubhouse.
“We have a really good senior class,” said Harder. “[Former head coach and mentor Don Vaughan] did a really great job of getting these guys, and now we have players that can play a ton of minutes for us. We can look at our roster and know that Tommy Bergland, Reid Irwin and Nic Belpedio and three forwards like Brett Chroske, Ben Raymond and Alex DiPaolo are going to log a lot of minutes. But it’s not even just that because they exude this calm and determined demeanor that’s so great to be around.
“The rest of the group, even with nine new faces, knows that they can fold-in pretty quickly and understand the gravity of the moment by watching the way those six guys handle themselves. And when things get a little crazy – which ECAC games can get – they keep their cool and get out there to do their jobs. That’s been really fun to be around.”
Fun, along with humor and a dash of good hockey, is exactly how Colgate continued to persevere through a stretch of injury-addled weeks that slowly kept the lineup from attaining consistency.
Even after sustaining more bang-ups against Cornell, the 5-2-1 league record developed from a depth chart truly forged by being forced to work together. In total, 10 players have at least three goals with 13 players tallying at least three assists, and nine players entered Christmas break with a positive plus-minus rating.
Combined with timely goaltending from Andrew Takacs, who made 33 saves in the win over Harvard and found himself pressed closer to 30 shots by Brown, Dartmouth and Princeton (all wins, though Dartmouth technically lodged a tie ahead of the shootout victory), the Raiders find themselves building a new brand of hockey that’s differentiating itself as the 2023 championship begins to distance itself in the program’s rear view mirror.
“We had a meeting [after Cornell] and talked and asked the guys how they were going to get better over their break,” Harder said. “For some guys, that’s about getting healthy and getting their mental sharpness back or refined. It’s about talking to their coaches at home, their skating coaches, and their sports psychologists. For others, it’s about finding downtime without losing their edge.
“For the staff, this is a huge time. We need to familiarize ourselves with the CHL and figure out how we’re going to attack it or if we’re not going to attack it, how to do it. It’s about hitting the road and maybe using the advantage of hitting the road as a first place team. We need to learn some things, and that’s what we’re all trying to do.”
Colgate formally returns to the ice on Jan. 10 and 11 when it hosts Long Island for a pair of games at Class of 1965 Arena. Ahead of that series, a Jan. 4 exhibition against Canada’s Concordia University reintroduces the Raiders to competitive hockey before ECAC play restarts on Jan. 17-18 with the Quinnipiac-Princeton road trip.
