Recruiting Patterns

It seems Cornell's recruiting patterns have shifted. We used to get a steady stream from the BCHL, especially Nanaimo. But right now Chris Heisenberg reports that we have only one BCHL recruit, Mitch Gillam, a goalie from Chilliwack.

OTOH, it seems we're more than holding our own recruiting from Ontario and Eastern Canada. This has traditionally been fertile ground for Cornell recruiting, but it seems that ten years ago Schafer was more likely to pick up players out west than from our northern neighboring province.

Some apparent changes, like the fact we're getting players from the USNDTP are easy to understand -- we've become more competitive recruiting top talent. But others, like fewer players from the BCHL and more from the OJHL, are harder to fathom. Is this just my impression, or has our recruiting pattern shifted? If so, what accounts for the shift? Is it a qualitative improvement, or just different geography?

Swampy
It seems Cornell's recruiting patterns have shifted. We used to get a steady stream from the BCHL, especially Nanaimo. But right now Chris Heisenberg reports that we have only one BCHL recruit, Mitch Gillam, a goalie from Chilliwack.

OTOH, it seems we're more than holding our own recruiting from Ontario and Eastern Canada. This has traditionally been fertile ground for Cornell recruiting, but it seems that ten years ago Schafer was more likely to pick up players out west than from our northern neighboring province.

Some apparent changes, like the fact we're getting players from the USNDTP are easy to understand -- we've become more competitive recruiting top talent. But others, like fewer players from the BCHL and more from the OJHL, are harder to fathom. Is this just my impression, or has our recruiting pattern shifted? If so, what accounts for the shift? Is it a qualitative improvement, or just different geography?

Having different assistants, each with different contacts would be one major change.

I've grouped players by incoming class on a report which includes hometown so changes in this pattern should be apparent.

On the Players index page, select Players, Grouped by First Year from the Miscellaneous group.

(BTW, this is a test of displaying multi-page reports using a PDF viewer. If anybody has problems, particularly using odd browsers, please let me know.)

Weren't there coaches or involved parents a decade ago with strong ties that sent players to Cornell and perhaps that link is not as strong as before. Ontario makes sense geographically at 300 miles away. Surely TBRW must have a geo-plot of player hometowns or junior teams dating to Laing Kennedy's playing days. The only thing more comprehensive is Nate Silver on voting trends among the states.

billhoward
Weren't there coaches or involved parents a decade ago with strong ties that sent players to Cornell and perhaps that link is not as strong as before. Ontario makes sense geographically at 300 miles away. Surely TBRW must have a geo-plot of player hometowns or junior teams dating to Laing Kennedy's playing days. The only thing more comprehensive is Nate Silver on voting trends among the states.

Maybe the New York Times will hire one of us to write a regular column on Cornell hockey recruiting patterns.

billhoward
Surely TBRW must have a geo-plot of player hometowns or junior teams dating to Laing Kennedy's playing days.

I don't, but... well, lemme just say that would be super cool and maybe I'll work on it.

Animated time series of Mass Moment of Games Played by Year. Makes me excited just thinking about it.

Don't you judge me.

billhoward
Weren't there coaches or involved parents a decade ago with strong ties that sent players to Cornell and perhaps that link is not as strong as before.

There is definitely a virtuous cycle that reinforces recruiting patterns. Back when we recruited almost exclusively from the Golden Horseshoe, the connection of players to their family members or younger teammates, the continuity of coaches at feeder programs, and the repeat recruiting trips to the same places year after year, all made it very likely that subsequent classes would come from the same places. Also there's the obverse: opportunity cost that heads off investment in another region.

Seems to me that it's the breaks in recruiting patterns that are more in need of explanation than continuity. 1989 was the first year when the recruiting started to make inroads in the west. That class would have been recruited during the 1988 season. So what happened in 1988?

Trotsky
I've grouped players by incoming class on a report which includes hometown so changes in this pattern should be apparent.

On the Players index page, select Players, Grouped by First Year from the Miscellaneous group.

(BTW, this is a test of displaying multi-page reports using a PDF viewer. If anybody has problems, particularly using odd browsers, please let me know.)

Thanks. This is very good. Maybe we can copy and paste it into a spreadsheet to do some analysis.

One thing that makes this difficult is the significance of home location vs junior team. In many cases, players take a PGY or join a junior team during years they would otherwise be at a local high school. The junior teams advertise their college prep programs, and players see this as a way to improve their chances of playing DI. Often the junior team is far away from the home state or province.

Sometimes the junior team's coaches have good relations with particular college coaches, and the junior club becomes a pipeline to particular colleges. This appears to have been the case with Bill Bestwick and Nanaimo about ten years ago. Other times the players commit to a DI program and the college coach "suggests" they spend a year or two playing juniors before enrolling in college. The Devin brothers did this and played for Bestwick, I think.

So at the very least, we'd also want to know the junior team and its location and coach. For example, now that Bestwick is coaching the Victoria Grizzles, has Victoria supplanted the Clippers as a source of Big Red players?

Even with such information, disentangling the question of cause and effect would require knowing the story behind the numbers.

billhoward
The only thing more comprehensive is Nate Silver on voting trends among the states.

Reading the Bill James Baseball Abstracts (and being extremely homesick for Cornell hockey living in California) in the late 80's led to TBRW. Nate Silver read the same books and went a slightly different direction.

But I'm not bitter.

Swampy
Thanks. This is very good. Maybe we can copy and paste it into a spreadsheet to do some analysis.

Don't have to. It's output from the database that underlies all the pages on the site, so any sort of analysis we'd care to do can be coded against the raw data. I was only kidding slightly about the geo-plot. It wouldn't be conceptually difficult at all, I just need a look-up table for towns <--> Lat/Lon.

Trotsky
I've grouped players by incoming class on a report which includes hometown so changes in this pattern should be apparent.

On the Players index page, select Players, Grouped by First Year from the Miscellaneous group.

(BTW, this is a test of displaying multi-page reports using a PDF viewer. If anybody has problems, particularly using odd browsers, please let me know.)

I'll bite.

Notes: I ignored players who didn't have a home country or home province listed. TBRW lists players by "year in spring of their first season playing varsity hockey" so it has two classes listed as 1976 (it also lists two classes as 1994, but that's just a typo); to be able to make a continuous plot, I converted this to "year in fall of their freshman year." I started with the class entering fall of 1958, as these players were seniors in the spring of 61-62, the first season of ECAC hockey. I've therefore captured every player who's ever played in an ECAC game for Cornell. Finally, when looking at the head coaching trends, I gave each head coach "credit" for one recruiting class beyond his tenure - e.g. I counted the players who entered in fall of '95 as a McCutcheon recruiting class, since that was Schafer's first season.

Trends I noticed:

- The first ECAC class was 100% American, but that dropped rapidly to 0% 6 years later. I kind of always thought that the change was a step function: 100% American before Harkness, 100% Canadian after, but it looks like Paul Patten actually started testing the recruiting grounds in Ontario first.

- Once Harkness took over, it was definitely the Ontario pipeline. He did have 2 players from Western Canada enter in 1965, but overall 87% ofhis players were Canadian and 89% of his Canadians were eastern.

- Not too surprisingly, Bertrand followed his lead, with 82% of his players from Canada, and 100% of them from the east.

- Reycroft upped the ante, going 86% Canadian and 100% eastern.

- At this point, there'd been a grand total of 6 Westerners (2%), 196 Easterners (77%), and 54 Americans (21%).

- McCutcheon brought the sea change of focusing on Western Canada. He averaged 35% Westerners, 35% Easterners, and 25% Americans (5% other), starting right off the bat with his first entering class (1988) being 36%-36%-28%. This split was pretty consistent during his tenure except for the class entering in 1991 which had no westerners - just a couple of schlubs named Manderville and Hughes...

- Schafer has dropped the fraction of westerners (32%) and easterners (28%); they've been replaced by more Americans (35%) while the fraction of "other" has been consistent with McCutcheon (4%). Within Shafer's tenure, there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. 6 of his Canadians were eaestern in 2002, followed up with 5 of 5 western in 2003, then back to 2 west/1 east in 2004. Perhaps there are some sub-trends with changes in assistant coaches, but I didn't go that crazy. There may be a slight recent upward trend in the 4-year rolling average of US players, but it's hard to tell since it is skewed by the class entering 2011 (67% American). Too early to tell if that is a trend or an anomaly yet, especially since it was just in 2009 that there was only 1 American and 8 easterners entering.


Some other oddities I noticed:
- Our first ever player from outside the US and Canada listed in TBRW was in 1958, one year too soon to play in the ECAC.
- The next non-North-American we had was in 1993, which was also the only class with 2 non-North-American players: Klobocek and Vershinin.
- 1993 was also the largest recruiting class, a.k.a. the "holy crap this isn't working" class, where McCutcheon brought in 14 players to see what would stick.

I've saved my spreadsheet, so let me know if you have anything else you'd like me to look for.

Robb
Our first ever player from outside the US and Canada listed in TBRW was in 1958, one year too soon to play in the ECAC.

IIRC, that guy was from the Bahamas, and given it was the 50's I assume it was when the hockey team (and the university) still looked like tryouts for:




Upper Class Twit of the Year.

Robb

- Once Harkness took over, it was definitely the Ontario pipeline. He did have 2 players from Western Canada enter in 1965, but overall 87% ofhis players were Canadian and 89% of his Canadians were eastern.

Wait a minute. Are you considering Saskatchewan to be western Canada? Old farts like me remember three schlubs named Ferguson whom Ned recruited. But if I recall correctly, they were sort of an anomaly since Murray Armstrong -- the legendary Denver coach -- didn't have room for them on his roster, so he tipped off his friend Ned Harkness about them. FYP.

BTW, the brothers Ferguson started playing varsity hockey in 1965, but they came to Cornell and played Frosh hockey in 1964. Here's an article that will teach all the young whipper-snappers out there about this important part of Cornell hockey history.

Anything west of Ontario IS Western Canada.

Jeff Hopkins '82
Anything west of Ontario IS Western Canada.

The west begins at Whitefish Bay. Western Ontario may as well be North Dakota.

Swampy

Robb

- Once Harkness took over, it was definitely the Ontario pipeline. He did have 2 players from Western Canada enter in 1965, but overall 87% ofhis players were Canadian and 89% of his Canadians were eastern.

Wait a minute. Are you considering Saskatchewan to be western Canada? Old farts like me remember three schlubs named Ferguson whom Ned recruited. But if I recall correctly, they were sort of an anomaly since Murray Armstrong -- the legendary Denver coach -- didn't have room for them on his roster, so he tipped off his friend Ned Harkness about them. FYP.

BTW, the brothers Ferguson started playing varsity hockey in 1965, but they came to Cornell and played Frosh hockey in 1964. Here's an article that will teach all the young whipper-snappers out there about this important part of Cornell hockey history.

Exactly. They entered in the fall of 1963, so per my methodology, they are officially credited to Patten since he coached in 62-63. The two westerners I credited to Harkness were Ted Coviello (BC) and Harold Hegland (Alberta), both of whom entered in the fall of '65 (first varsity season 66-67).

Anyone know the exact history on the Fergusons? Did they only come to Cornell because Harkness became the coach? Or did they make their commitment while Patten was still in office?

Jeff Hopkins '82
Anything west of Ontario IS Western Canada.

You're thinking of the New Yorker-Canada Edition cover cartoon, yes?

Swampy

Robb

- Once Harkness took over, it was definitely the Ontario pipeline. He did have 2 players from Western Canada enter in 1965, but overall 87% ofhis players were Canadian and 89% of his Canadians were eastern.

Wait a minute. Are you considering Saskatchewan to be western Canada? Old farts like me remember three schlubs named Ferguson whom Ned recruited. But if I recall correctly, they were sort of an anomaly since Murray Armstrong -- the legendary Denver coach -- didn't have room for them on his roster, so he tipped off his friend Ned Harkness about them. FYP.

BTW, the brothers Ferguson started playing varsity hockey in 1965, but they came to Cornell and played Frosh hockey in 1964. Here's an article that will teach all the young whipper-snappers out there about this important part of Cornell hockey history.

Thanks, I haven't reread that article in years. To expand upon the Dryden quote:

Another Cornell goalie is Ken Dryden, a sophomore, whose brother, Dave, substituted for Glenn Hall in the Chicago Black Hawks' goal last season. "Ken," says his father, Murray Dryden, "thought he was going to Princeton, but Ned talked him out of it. He sold the school to all of us, and he kept saying that he was building for a national championship. Ken never did get to Princeton."

The talk was that Princeton told them he was building to win the Ivies and ECAC, but Ned told him he was building for a national championship. Boy, how I wish he never got the bug to go pro. Ned, that is. To further build upon his history, when Dan Lodboa came back to CU a few years ago, he told the story about a recruit from when Ned was at Union, I believe. The story goes that the recruit came to Dan and asked what to do as he heard that Ned might be leaving. Dan's response was, "You go where Ned goes."

To try and answer the Ferguson question, it was said to be just as above, Ned got them, with a little help.

Swampy
BTW, the brothers Ferguson started playing varsity hockey in 1965, but they came to Cornell and played Frosh hockey in 1964. Here's an article that will teach all the young whipper-snappers out there about this important part of Cornell hockey history.

Thanks for the link. As an RPI fan, I also enjoy reading about Harkness. It is interesting that the three related articles linked at the bottom are about RPI (one about the football team breaking its non-winning streak in 1965 -- I was at that game). Hasn't there ever been another article about Cornell in SI?

Trotsky
Seems to me that it's the breaks in recruiting patterns that are more in need of explanation than continuity. 1989 was the first year when the recruiting started to make inroads in the west. That class would have been recruited during the 1988 season. So what happened in 1988?

Some guy who played at Cornell also started having a noteworthy NHL career in western Canada in 1987-88 and maybe got the program some name recognition out in that region.