ELynah Forum

A top 5 matchup according to the early NPI. Which goalie gets the start? I'd give it to Cournoyer because we can ride the hot hand and I'm comfortable giving Keopple next Friday vs brown.

With the preseason over and less than a week before our first game it's time to look ahead.

Umass is 5-2 with wins over Northern Michigan, Stonehill, Bentley (overtime) and Omaha and losses to Northeastern and Omaha.

Their leading scorer is Jack Musa, who we are familiar with from the last couple years. Second is freshman Vaclav Nestrasil, who is a 6 foot 6 beast from Czechia.

In goal is Michael Hrabal who is a fantastic player as well.

Should be a tough series and I would be very happy with a split. With so many freshmen and how we looked in the preseason I really have no clue what to expect though.

Very exciting to have a game this week. I am super curios to see how all of the newcomers look, as well as guys returning from injury. The Czechs play Yale on Wednesday so if they publish the stats from that one we can get a sense of what kind of score line we should hope for.

https://www.sportsnet.ca/nhl/article/former-canadiens-goalie-ken-dryden-passes-away-at-age-78/

Just found myself watching the highlights from the UToronto exhibition and realized I could be doing better. What old games/highlight reels would you guys recommend?

My go to is the Clarkson game from 2020.

https://youtu.be/puQ_pNub8OM?si=BYu7_rqer181goxH

There's also this great video with every goal from the 2019-2020 season.

https://youtu.be/JBK6dL-W7_s?si=iYT67CKtbc6k206g

Schedule just dropped and there's some good games on there including a west coast trip, but there's also a treat for those of us in Ithaca with us hosting three very good teams in Western Michigan, Akron and Syracuse.

https://cornellbigred.com/sports/mens-soccer/schedule/2025

Looking at the roster, Ryan Friedberg and Andrew Johnson are listed despite both of them being in the MLS super draft (and Johnson actually being selected). It's a huge boost to the potential of this team to keep those two.

Losing Harris is big and it will be hard to compensate for all of the scoring that he did for us. Harris has mostly been playing for the Rapids II squad and with his style of game I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he never manages to lock down a spot in the MLS.

I think the bigger piece that we lost is actually Alioune Ka. Ka fit coach Smith's formation and style of play so well with his work rate, scoring touch and size and I'm not sure we have anyone else that can play the winger in our 4-4-2 nearly as well.

Overall I am very confident in our defense with Friedberg, Johnson, Melly and Martin being some of the best players on the team. Our midfield should also be solid with tons of depth and plenty of experience. Up top is where we will be challenged. We're left with pretty much nobody with legit experience up top. A bunch of our recruits are listed as forwards but I have no clue about the talent of any of them, hopefully one will be able to step into a starting role.

I think fair expectations for this team are to finish in the top half of the Ivy League. I wouldn't expect us to make the NCAA tourney without winning the Ivy tourney but I sure hope I'm wrong. Those bad weather NCAA tournament games at Berman are some of my best Cornell sports memories. Looking forward to a fun season starting August 23 with an exhibition against Cortland!

Figured we could use a thread for the month where the magic happens. I think a brown loss tomorrow clinches ivy madness for us but if that doesn't happen we can do it ourselves on Sunday. Hoping we can get Dartmouth in the 2/3 matchup so that Yale and Princeton beat each other up in their game.

Cornell is up 10-0 on #17 Duke in the 7th inning, amazing start to the season. Duke getting no hit through 6.

Union started off having a nice year but have cooled off. They have a freshman, Ben muthersbaugh, who came out of nowhere and is one of their top goalscorers. Their goaltending is pretty weak and they have never been a team that scares me in recent years so I'm hopeful for a win.

Less than a week away from the second half now, close enough to look ahead. Umass is a solid team but has a mediocre record and are buoyed by a strong strength of schedule. We played an exciting game with them in placid last year with us leading late and them scoring a goal with the net empty to tie it (if I remember correctly), and us winning the shootout. The main scorers to look out for are forwards Suniev and O'Hara. They will be missing two guys because of the world juniors, their tank of a goalie, Hrabal (playing for Czechia), and freshman forward jencko (playing for Slovakia), who hasn't produced much this year. This means we will face the backup goalie Jackson Irving who hasn't played much but has been really good in his rare minutes.


The last game will be against either ASU or Robert Morris. Neither team scares me much but Robert morris would certainly be the easier game. I think that both teams are overrated by the pairwise right now but arizona state is red hot (won their last 5, all NCHC games) and is playing at home. At least we should be used to this arena by now because it seems like we've played in Tempe as much as we have in Ithaca during the Schafer warm weather tour over the past few years.

Last time I started a game thread we swept so let's bring that back. Colgate is hovering around #40 in the pairwise but they have some good results like a tie against Dartmouth and wins against Quinnipiac and Harvard. They are atop the ECAC right now so a sweep would be very ideal. Their out of conference record has certainly not helped the rest of the ECAC as they have been swept in 3 of their 5 OOC series and their 2 of their 3 OOC wins came against RIT who is shockingly terrible this year (62 in the pairwise). I'm excited to be at both games this weekend and I think we can get it done, LGR.

A little early to be looking ahead but I'm overeager for this series. Coming into the series 3-2, North Dakota seems like your typical NCHC powerhouse, a great offense that they use to cover up what honestly seems like a pretty poor defense. Their powerplay has been unbelievable so far, above 45% on the season, the highest in the nation. Their penalty kill has been very weak though at just 75%. Still I would not want to see us get into a scrappy game with tons of penalties against them because I don't trust our powerplay enough yet. They are going to be a very skilled team so I'd love to see us lean into our reputation of a big, physical, defensively strong team (but it might be hard to do that while staying away from penalties).

Their goalie situation is up in the air with their newest rental goalie TJ semptimphelter having been disappointing so far. Semptimphelter should be a familiar name because we faced him 3 times last year when he was on ASU and we did progressively better against him each game. The backup Hobie Hedquist has only played one game this year and didn't get many reps last year but he had a good game against Mankato but came away with the loss. I would guess that they split the series between the goalies, Semp on Friday and Hedquist on Saturday. Hopefully we can solve Semp like we did in our last game against him when we chased him in the second period after 3 goals and just 10 saves.

It has already been an up and down season for Nodak as they started with a 4-1 exhibition loss to Augusta. They then turned around to beat providence 5-2. The next weekend they split with Mankato before a 7-2 win over BU but they lost on Saturday. As you can tell by their schedule and their NCHC membership they are going to be much more comfortable big games and close games than us. As for expectations for the series I would say that I would be disappointed with a sweep, fine as long as we get a tie, happy with a split, and ecstatic with a sweep. My prediction is a 6-3 win on Friday as our guys hopefully know how to solve semptimphelter by now, and a 5-3 loss on Saturday. Let's go red!

We played pretty well and the crowd was unreal for an exhibition game. Great to see Walsh come back and get the empty netter after going off injured.

Cornell starts off at a strong #9 in the preseason poll with 2 first place votes. If I had to guess I would say one came from the Denver coach given how we played them last year (and he can't vote for Denver) but not sure how we got two. Looking forward to this season and surpassing expectations again.

2 minutes into the season and we're looking great, I know we're just playing Marist but this is encouraging already.

Does anybody know when student season tickets tend to be released and how quickly they sell out? Thanks!

I went to my first Cornell baseball game of the year today and my first ever at Booth field. Starting with the game, Cornell pitched a gem until the ninth and played sound defense to complete the sweep. Although we are playing well in the Ivy so far and the league seems weak this year I doubt that we will really be able to compete with Penn or Columbia, I'm hoping for a top half of the league finish. Cornell's jerseys are pretty sweet but I bet they won't be so glad when they're wearing black while playing on turf on a 90 degree day in may.

As for the new field, I don't love it. The one thing that I do like is the vibe of literally being out in the middle of a field playing baseball. To start the negatives off, the place was no more than 15 percent full but the parking lot had no spots so I had to park at the soccer practice fields and walk about a quarter of a mile through a field of tall grass to get the the field. It wasn't too bad today but on a wetter day or in the late spring when it is overgrown that just won't be feasible. Oh, and you can't find the field on Apple Maps or google maps so you better just remember where it is. Saving the most obvious for last, it is just too far out of the way. It was nice seeing some older people and families out there but there were almost no students, presumably due to the location. I miss the central location of Hoy field and I have so many good memories of biking to the top of the parking garage and watching games from there. The new facilities and buildings out at Booth seem nice but I would have much preferred they stayed at Hoy.

Cornell soccer takes a 1-0 loss to Vermont in the first game of the season. Cornell looked really good in the second half generating a lot of offensive chances but were shut down by the Vermont keeper. The only goal of the game was an unlucky deflection off of our defender but later in the game we had numerous dangerous tackles in our own box that easily could have been called. Definitely not the result you want to see but overall I would call it and encouraging performance. Next is New Hampshire on Monday, if we get a win there I would certainly be satisfied with this road trip, splitting against 2 ranked teams.

I was at schoellkopf today and the steps and structure of the stadium is literally falling apart all over the place and the turf is pretty terrible at this point. Does anyone know if there is a plan to fix up the stands or put in new turf any time soon?