The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
How Connecticut grew into a hotbed
New Haven, a vibrant city that’s been on the cutting edge of technology dating back to its Puritanical roots, has long been a place where ideas become living, breathing innovation. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Samuel Colt’s automatic revolver. A.C. Gilbert’s Erector Set, to name a few.
So it’s hardly a surprise the Elm City has ties to several firsts in the sporting world.
Some, such as the curveball and the Frisbee, are difficult to prove. Others, like Walter Camp’s refinement of football from organized chaos into the game we watch on autumn weekends, are irrefutable.
Another incontrovertible truth? College hockey originated at Yale.
It began when a couple of Yale tennis players, Malcolm Chace and Arthur Foote, traveled to Canada for a tournament and observed a game being played with sticks and skates yet to make its way to American colleges — ice hockey.
Immediately drawn to the sport’s physicality and fastpaced nature, the pair spent subsequent trips to upstate New York and Canada making time for hockey, determined to form a team at Yale.
By the winter of 1896 they’d recruited a group of fellow students, taught them the rules, scrounged up equipment and even arranged for a pair of games to be played in Baltimore.
The first, a 3-2 loss to the Baltimore Athletic Club, was played on Jan. 31, 1896. The following day Yale played Johns Hopkins to a 2-2 tie, an otherwise unremarkable affair aside from
holding the distinction as the first intercollegiate hockey game in U.S. history.
College hockey quickly spread to colder pockets of country, places where ponds and lakes froze over in the winter. Yale, at the forefront of the college game, competed against top competition and often produced championship-caliber teams.
But it would take more than 60 years before another state school, UConn, joined the fun. And it wasn’t until the late 1990s, a century after that historic meeting between Yale and Johns Hopkins, that Connecticut had multiple programs competing at the NCAA Division I level.
This weekend’s launch of Connecticut Ice is a celebration of the past 20 years and the rapid growth of NCAA hockey in the area. There will be youth jamborees and high school games; clinics and seminars for young players, families and coaches.
The highlight, of course, will be a two-day tournament with Yale, Quinnipiac, UConn and Sacred Heart to determine a college state champion.
How did Connecticut find its place as one of the hotbeds of the sport? Let’s take a look.
RAPID RISE OF THE Q
Quinnipiac hockey can be traced back to a magic marker and hand-written sheet of notebook paper posted to a student center bulletin board in the fall of 1970. The message was short and to the point.
“Anyone interested in playing hockey contact Mike Patlin.”
There had been club teams at Quinnipiac in the 1960s, rag-tag, on-again, off-again that never quite stuck. When Patlin, a wildhaired sophomore transfer student from New York, arrived on campus he learned the club team had disbanded a few years earlier due to lack of interest. Eager to play the game he loved in between his studies, he went about the task of securing players and funding from Burt Kahn, the school’s athletic director.
“The one thing Quinnipiac was lacking to me personally was a hockey team,” Patlin said. “It was more of a basketball school then. I figured if there was ever going to be a hockey team it would be up to me to start one.”
Over the next three years the club team thrived, Patlin and classmate Bill Dungan doing the bulk of the grunt work. By 1975, their grass roots effort was rewarded when the university administration green-lit the program to varsity status.
It would take Herculean work by a pair of administrative visionaries and a relentlessly driven coach that brought Quinnipiac to once unimaginable heights in college hockey.
John Lahey, named university president in 1987, saw hockey as a path to elevate the school’s academic profile. He lured Jack McDonald, overseer of the University of Denver’s reemergence as a hockey power, to become Quinnipiac’s athletic director in 1994.
McDonald’s task: to engineer an upgrade of all sports at the tiny commuter school — with a particular emphasis on hockey. There were fewer than 60 Division I programs, allowing previously unknown schools like Lake Superior State and Colorado College to win multiple national championships. Otherwise anonymous places like Ferris State and Alaska-Fairbanks were rubbing elbows with elite universities like Notre Dame and Michigan as conference mates.
Quinnipiac, under the right circumstances, could potentially align itself with Ivy League neighbors and compete for national titles.
Enter Rand Pecknold, a 26-year old high school teacher and former Division III defenseman. Hired by McDonald as the team’s coach at a paltry annual salary of $6,700, Pecknold turned out to be much more than a conduit to big-time hockey. He quickly proved to be a dedicated, ambitious and exceptional coach.
“I could see that he was good and a little crazy,” McDonald said. “He was young, which was key. He was well educated and he was an aggressive recruiter.”
In the early days Pecknold slept in three hour shifts between midnight practices and his day job as a teacher. When Quinnipiac finally transitioned to Division I, he made recruiting trips on his own dime. Visits to his parents, who had moved to Washington State, doubled as opportunities to scour Western Canada for talent.
Pecknold managed to establish a reliable pipeline from British Columbia to Quinnipiac despite the fact that most of the Canadian recruits had never seen, much less heard of the school. Yet Quinnipiac was so dominant in the newlycreated MAAC Hockey League that when Vermont left the ECAC for Hockey East in 2004, it immediately became a front-runner to fill the vacancy.
Plans for a state-of-theart rink, set atop land purchased on Hamden’s York Hill, pushed Quinnipiac past Holy Cross as the replacement of choice. The league, considered one of four major conferences in the country, ensured Lahey’s dreams of associating with Ivy League partners and competing for national titles.
A NEW HOPE AT YALE
As Quinnipiac was thriving, Yale’s once-proud hockey program had fallen on hard times. There was an ECAC championship in 1998, its first in the league’s 36-year history. But things digressed into the 21st century, hitting rock bottom in 2005 when the Bulldogs lost a program record 25 games.
A year later Tom Beckett, Yale’s athletic director, made the difficult decision to move on from longtime coach Tim Taylor, a legendary and beloved figure in the hockey world.
The Bulldogs needed a fresh start. Beckett hired Keith Allain, a former Yale goaltender who earned his coaching chops under Taylor before moving on to become an NHL assistant. What happened over the next few seasons went beyond anyone’s dreams.
The tide actually began to shift thanks to Taylor, whose own recruiting efforts provided a foundation for Allain. A pair of Connecticut natives, Greenwich’s Sean Backman and Milford’s Mark Arcobello, along with New England prep schoolers Broc Little and Denny Kearney, were at the heart of Yale’s remarkable turnaround.
Under Allain’s direction, Yale won the ECAC in 2009 and qualified for the NCAA tournament for the first time in 11 years. Talented recruits continued to flow through the program. In 2011, the Bulldogs were the top-ranked team in the nation at the close of the regular season, blitzing the competition for a second league title in three years. But the ultimate goal, a national title, remained elusive when Yale fell one game short of the Frozen Four after a controversial loss to Minnesota-Duluth.
HOCKEY HAVEN
Two years later, during the 2012-13 season, the perfect storm hit New Haven County.
Yale’s good fortune on the recruiting trail continued, providing the most skill and depth ever to grace the fabled ice at Ingalls Rink.
Andrew Miller, a former USA Hockey player of the year and brilliant playmaker, was now a senior. He was joined by the likes of dangerous scoring threat Kenny Agostino — once New Jersey’s high school player of the year and a highly-regarded pro prospect traded for NHL legend Jarome Iginla while still a college junior that winter — along with offensive-minded forwards Antoine Laganiere and Jesse Root.
Tommy Fallen, Ryan Obuchowski and Rob O’Gara spearheaded a young yet immensely talented defensive group. Senior goaltender Jeff Malcolm, enjoying one of the best seasons in Yale history, was the glue that held it all together.
Eight miles up Whitney Avenue, Quinnipiac, a year after a mediocre campaign, was putting together a season for the ages.
Identical twin brothers Connor and Kellen Jones were not only talented but two of the most ferocious competitors in college hockey. There was Matthew Peca, a gifted scorer with NHL-caliber skill; Jordan Samuels-Thomas, a transfer from Bowling Green and formidable presence at power forward.
And there was Eric Hartzell, an eccentric personality whose hobbies included juggling and beatboxing who also happened to be the best goaltender in the country.
Quinnipiac, the No. 1 team in the polls, steamrolled toward the postseason. An unbeaten streak that began a few days after Halloween continued past Valentine’s Day, 21 games all told. There was a doubleovertime thriller in Game 3 of the ECAC quarterfinals against Cornell, and though the Bobcats were upset in the league semifinals against Brown they were the top overall seed in the NCAA tournament.
A late-season losing streak that stemmed from an injury to Malcolm nearly kept Yale out of the NCAA field of 16. But the cards fell in the right order in the days leading into the selection show. The Bulldogs, thanks to Notre Dame’s victory over Michigan in the CCHA championship game hours before ESPN’s broadcast, snuck into the field.