Yale reaching new heights this season
Bulldogs earned first Top-10 ranking in November
NEW HAVEN — There was a sense in the Yale women’s hockey dressing room that this team could be good. Just how good, they weren’t initially sure, junior forward Claire Dalton said.
“I don’t know about September,” said Dalton, twotime team MVP as voted by her teammates. “But by the end of September, once we’d been through a month of practice, then even at the end of October, this was definitely expected.”
The Bulldogs reached their winter break Wednesday night at Ingalls Rink with a 3-2 win over Boston University. They’re 10-3-1, and only twice since 2009 has the program posted more victories in a season; the Bulldogs were 17-15 in 2019-20, the last year they played, since the Ivy League canceled sports last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The program picked up the first top-10 ranking in its history in mid-November. Yale is ranked No. 7 in the USCHO poll and No. 8 in the USA Today/USA Hockey poll.
“It’s a dream come true, honestly,” junior Rebecca Vanstone said. “Coming in my freshman year, I never thought it would be possible.
“Coach Mark (Bolding) has done an excellent job
recruiting with the program, really changed it around with some great baselines for us to follow. Without him, the group of players wouldn’t be who we are today.”
Yale was 2-2 after losses to Princeton and Quinnipiac in late October. Games at Cornell and Clarkson loomed the next weekend. Yale didn’t allow a goal on the trip.
The Bulldogs came home and beat Harvard and Dartmouth, then went back to upstate New York and came home with a win over Clarkson and a tie with St. Lawrence.
“I think they just believe, ‘hey, we can beat anybody,’” Bolding said. “Even the losses were games we could have won. There’s a lot of momentum, a lot of positivity.
“Now they can just sort of finish up school and have a bit of a break.”
Yale’s only other loss was in overtime to Quinnipiac at
the Nutmeg Classic in Storrs on Thanksgiving weekend. They’ll meet one more time, in Hamden on Feb. 18, the last weekend of the regular season.
The Bulldogs are tied for fourth in ECAC Hockey with Princeton; they’ve never finished higher. They’ve only been to one ECAC semifinal and never a final.
Bolding said he has never seen a team so close, particularly in a big class of juniors, a lot of whom took the last school year off when it became apparent they wouldn’t have a season.
Dalton said they stayed close online, and 14 freshmen have fit in well.
“One of the girls ... I’ve known since I was 8 years old,” Vanstone said. “A lot of girls I’ve known for a really long time. It’s so random that everyone ended up at this school together, but they’re my best friends in the whole world.
“I live with Claire Dalton.
I’m with Kaitlyn Rippon and Charlotte Welch all the time; we’re pretty much inseparable. It’s so crazy how we ended up here in the same class, and they’re like my sisters.”
Sophomore Elle Hartje leads the team with 24 points, setting up Vanstone twice for goals on Wednesday to move two points ahead of Dalton. Junior Emma Seitz was the ECAC player of the month for November with nine goals from defense.
Yale is 8-1-1 in its past 10. Yale had eight wins in all of 2018-19, the first season for most of this junior class.
“Freshman year, we’d get down a goal and it would just be like, ‘ugh, here it is again,’ ‘it’s happening again,’” Vanstone said. “This year, everyone believes in the goals we’re setting as a team. Everybody buys into practice. It’s really fun.”
Yale will be back together just before New Year’s, but with a large contingent from Ontario, some of those women may meet up and skate during the break. The Bulldogs face Sacred Heart on Jan. 4, and then it’s all ECAC play from there as they try to make some more history.
“I’m very grateful I got to experience that freshman year, and now I can experience this junior year. It’s incredible,” Vanstone said. “It makes me so proud to be a Bulldog.”