Thank you Mike Schafer

I'm up late still thinking about the loss...

As this too was my last game as a student, I just wanted to thank Mike Schafer for the team he has prepared and provided for me these past four years. I appreciate his candid nature in this world of facades. I have seen a lot of wins over these years and am grateful for each one.

That timeout down 3-0 to keep the first power play unit on the ice was brilliant.

I also think his behavior when the goal was called back showed class. Sometimes you get the breaks, sometimes you don't. Move on. Keep coaching.

He'll bring us a championship some day. The man has too much talent to fail.

JH

Jeff Hopkins '82 wrote:

I also think his behavior when the goal was called back showed class. Sometimes you get the breaks, sometimes you don't. Move on. Keep coaching.

He'll bring us a championship some day. The man has too much talent to fail.

JH

In the name of pure selfishness, let's hope that title comes in Boston, before the frozen four moves west for at least two years.

I also want to thank the coach but for more than just a great year.

In '95-'96 he started his tenure with high hopes and a hell of a lot of hard work. Toward the middle of that season many of us knew something special was happening. My family made its first hockey weekend visit to a less than sold out Lynah and enjoyed a great weekend.

A few weeks later we enjoyed Cornell's return to NCAA action although the enjoyment would have been a bit greater had they beat Lake St. that afternoon.

From '96 to '02 we had a yearly tradition of a weekend in Ithaca at Lynah. The highlight of those weekends came early on when my 10 or 11-year-old daughter looked up at me with her big eyes as we walked across the Arts Quad.

"Dad, this is a really nice school"

"Yes, Anne and you have to work really hard if you want to be accepted to a school like this one."

Thanks, Coach for a bit of a set up there. We wouldn't have made that walk without Mike's return. We wouldn't have walked up and down the bell tower as a family and we sure wouldn't have seen the skating bears do their end of the year striptease. I wouldn't have enjoyed Cornell orchard apples on so many occasions and likely not have made that trip to the dairy bar last year. Afternoons at the library, breakfast at the Straight, walks to the gorge, dinner at Joe's...


The hockey program's resurgence at just the right time for a family of four to make the four hour trip into an annual affair was special indeed. Thank you times four and then some!!

I also want to thank Coach Schafer for emphasizing the tradition and dignity of Cornell hockey along with the winning. It is not at all surprising that he produced a Hobey Hat Trick and a Hockey Humanitarian the same year.



Post Edited (04-14-03 11:53)

[Q]. . . my 10 or 11-year-old daughter . . .

"Yes, Anne and you have to work really hard if you
want to be accepted to a school like this one."[/Q]

Two things, Marty. First, I think you need to know your daughter's age for birthday cards and things - not to mention her psychological well being.

Second, if I remember correctly, it appears that your son worked TOO hard in high school and ended up at a school without a real hockey team. So Anne has to be careful.



Post Edited (04-14-03 12:22)

[Q]Second, if I remember correctly, it appears that your son worked TOO hard in high school and ended up at a school without a real hockey team. So Anne has to be careful. [/Q]

Martin P.'s third year of hockey "away" games included three in Boston (Frozen Four). We made a side trip to a very nasty place in Cambridge. He and I enjoyed the anthro lecture but he wisely chose a nicer place to the south for his tour of duty.

nicer? New Haven is a dump...

Jason wrote:

nicer? New Haven is a dump...

Ummm. Maybe that was true 10 or 15 years ago before downtown New Haven made a comeback. But I can state with little reservation that New Haven is now actually a great place to live. Great restaurants, hopping night life, good bar scene, decent rail service. Being able to walk out your door to grab a bite or have a drink or do some shopping is greatly underappreciated in our car culture.

New Haven is large enough to have lots going on while small enough to have a vibrant student focused nightlife if that if what you are looking for. When you constrast this to Hanover with nothing but Dartmouth students or Boston or NY where everyone just sort of melts into city for the weekend, New Haven ends up being a great compromise.

Sure, New Haven has sketchy parts of town, but so does every other city. People act like Yale's campus is a shooting gallery or something when this is simply untrue. It may not be like Ithaca, but it isn't Compton either.

New Haven was very, very nasty about ten years ago. I have not been back since but judging by how much some other comparable garden spots have improved over that time (Providence, Pittsburgh, parts of Boston), I expect that it's much better. Gentrification is the best urban pacification strategy. Assume obvious Gap/Basra joke here.

Back from the edge of thread drift, here: [www.spiritone.com] is a comparison of Cornell coachs' records.



Post Edited (04-15-03 12:30)

Hey that's fine if you live there. It's a matter of opinion. But if you're talking about car culture, Boston is as far from that as you can get. I happen to live downtown now and can walk everywhere, even to work, but even before I did, a car is only a nuisance. And my trips to New Haven haven't really been that great, at least not the ones involving hockey games. My girlfriend used to live there, she couldn't wait to leave. To each her own.

It would be interesting to see Bertrand's record split up into early years and late years. As in, how did he do when he was riding Ned's coat tails, and how did he do when he'd pretty much pissed off all of Ned's contacts and couldn't recruit well anymore.

Just curious.

JH

Jeff: If Bertrand couldn't recruit well anymore in the later years (and I had not heard this before), how did he land Nethery, Kerling, Tredway, Eliot and Hayward, among others?

Nethery and Kerling were recruited early in Bertrand's tenure. They were also the stars of the team, so maybe they got better treatment. I also heard a rumor that Kerling set terms for coming back from TC3 after his suspension rather than jump to the NHL. I would think that knowing there was no depth in goal and you were getting a start as a freshman had something to do with Hayward. Don't know about Eliot. Frankly, he got lucky when Hayward got mono his sophomore year. Otherwise he'd have ridden the pines and Hayward would have played.

I was friends with one of the trainers on the team. He said that the general feeling among the players was Bertrand was not a good coach to play for. The expression "Dick Bertrand....before he dicks you" was used and there was a lot of animosity behind it. His honesty was called into question on more than one occasion. He would tell you anything to get you to do what he wanted and if that didn't work, tantrums were not out of the realm of possibility.

The word I heard was that Bertrand's mis-treatment of the players finally began to get out in the Ontario hockey circles where Ned had recruited so successfully, and that's what caused the decline in the early '80s.

All rumors and hearsay, I know, but where there's smoke...

JH

Jeff Hopkins '82 wrote:

All rumors and hearsay, I know, but where there's smoke...

There is a lawyer drafting a defamation complaint. . .

I'm related to three lawyers myself. My defense will probably be pro bono.

JH

I don't know that Bertrand's recruting went downhill. In this 11th year as coach 1980-81 were were 19-11 and made the NCAA torunament. I actually think recruiting was one of his strong points -- those teams in the late 70s were loaded with talent.

But he did recruit a lot of players. Since he wasn't limited by scholarships, Betrand felt that he could get an edge if one or two of the less talented members of each class blossomed. But it meant that he usually seem to have about 30 guys in the program, and I've always wondered how good that was for team morale to have so many recrutied palyers sitting in the stands each game.

Not only was it bad for morale, but he tended to play head games on who would skate and who would sit. Or tell you you'd skate in front of everyone, but when the time came he'd tell you wait in the locker room and get out of uniform ... after the team was on the ice.

I guess part of it my attitude was that the early 70s set the bar so high. The ECAC playoffs were a given. A run at the championship was expected.

And your're right. 78-79 was great. Not only did we win, but we destroyed teams, like Harvard 11-3, or Princeton 10-4. But after that things went downhill fast.

I tend to think of 79-80 as the year we played like crap (0.500), and then pulled a major upset in the tournament. I camped out for 24 hours in the snow for this? How would you have felt if this year's team went 0.500 and just barely made the tournament by coming back to beat BU in OT?

While 19-11 might be decent, compared to old expectations, it was a lousy year - we finished 7th. 7th for God's sake! We made a good run at the championship, but got beat by #8. We then went out to NMU for the playoffs and promptly got spanked. 81-82 we didn't even make the ECAC tournament.

I enrolled at Cornell when we were THE team to beat. I graduated when we were just another middle-of-the-pack team. IMO, Dick Bertrand contributed heavily to that decline.

JH

Ask yourself, is any of this relevant to or does any of this help the Cornell hockey program today?

I stand properly chastised.

Mea Culpa.

JH

It's Cornell hockey history which Schafer makes the learn learn and the fans should learn too, because it is a great (mostly) history. There was once a coach named Ned Harkness who left in 1970 to coach the Detriot Red Wings . His successor was Dick Bertrand a player on the 1970 team who kept the winning tradition alive for another 10 years.

Besides the "interesting history" factor, doesn't it also serve as a cautionary tale about how hockey success can be ephemeral? Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it...

The ECAC should thank Schafer as well. Mike has won more NCAA games than the entire rest of the ECAC combined during his tenure, and Cornell has played in twice as many games as any other ECAC team.

NCAA records since 1995-96:

W G Team
4 8 Cornell
1 4 Clarkson
1 4 St. Lawrence
1 3 Vermont
0 2 Harvard
0 1 Colgate
0 1 Princeton
0 1 Yale
0 0 Brown
0 0 Dartmouth
0 0 RPI
0 0 Union

And a measure of Schafer's success compared to other active ECAC coaches (records in all games): [www.spiritone.com]

Note that Mike has 17 fewer wins than Bob Gaudet... in 7 fewer seasons!

Take out 1996, the first year, and the numbers are even more staggering.

Adam Wodon wrote:
Take out 1996, the first year, and the numbers are even more staggering.

Although I don't know why you'd want to. 1996, while it featured some blowouts in the first half of the season (MSU, BU, CC), saw a return to a packed Lynah and wins over the hated Crimson, and a great run to the finish. After that stinky busride back from West Point, the Red went 14-3-1, including a valiant split in the North Country to secure home ice, a demolition of Brenzavich and Weder in the quarters, the first ECAC title in a decade, and a decent showing in the NCAAs. And we all know Schafer got screwed out of ECAC CotY that season.

Adam Wodon wrote:

Take out 1996, the first year, and the numbers are even more staggering.

One presumes you're referring to the ECAC's record in NCAA games (UVM's and Clarkson's sole wins were in 1996), not Schafer's 1996 record. The hazards of not using "threaded view."

D'oh!

Yeah, but what's Schafer's record against Gaudet?

Yeah, but Gaudet is still ugly

I believe we made that perfectly, clear to him, didn't we Roy?

JH

Indeed.