2022 Incoming Recruits

[upprdeck]

and yet we lost 2 games in OT so while they have more talent its not that we cant compete.

[ugarte]

I think our last recruit from the USNTDP watched Shane take Harvard to OT in a scoreless game.

[The Rancor]

It's getting pretty tiring repeatedly going up against a far more talented Harvard team. Unless Cornell figures out a way to compete with Harvard in recruiting, Harvard beating Cornell and winning ECAC championships will continue to be the norm.

Looking at their roster, Harvard recruits heavily from Massachusetts prep schools. Cornell can't really compete with them there. Harvard also recruits a few players each year from the US National Team Development Program. Again, Cornell seems to be uncompetitive for these players. We have historically ended up with a few of these players, such as Bardreau, Bliss, Tschantz, and Fiegl, but these recruits were all basically depth guys on the Under 17/Under 18 teams and I don't think we've had a single recruit from the USNTDP since 2014.

It would be great if Cornell could shore up the above weaknesses by winning recruiting battles in upstate NY, and indeed we have gotten some good players from there and continue to (eg. Ryan Walsh, who is among the USHL scoring leaders and should be coming next year). But even still, a lot of those guys end up at schools like BU.

I'd be curious to know if the coaching staff has any sort of answer for Harvard's recruiting dominance. Our future recruiting looks good, but not Harvard levels of good. What's the plan?

Cornell doesn't want high nhl draft picks that leave after 2 years and force a constant cycle of recruiting. We want solid, 4-year players that can be a part of a cohesive team, not stars.

Cornell is a school for guys who want to learn how to play defense. It's not that the team doesn't score, or that Coach doesn't teach that, but there's another side of the game you learn from Schafer. Recruits that want to run and gun, for better or worse, go somewhere else. Cornell has tradition, and a lot of other things going for it. Recruiting is hard, and we lost some of our best recruiters in the last 10 years or so, but still, the team gets results. I hope to see a big one someday.

[Al DeFlorio]

I'd be curious to know if the coaching staff has any sort of answer for Harvard's recruiting dominance. Our future recruiting looks good, but not Harvard levels of good. What's the plan?

I don't think you have a clue as to where Harvard stands in the pantheon of American universities, rightly or wrongly.  Harvard's yield rate is consistently in the 80-85% range.  Cornell's is 60-65%.  Kids who are accepted to Harvard go there, whether hockey players or not.  Only MIT has a comparable yield rate, and it's a different animal.  We can debate the merits of Harvard's reputation till we're blue in the face, but it is what it is, and it makes recruiting easy.

I think I'm pretty well aware of Harvard's academic reputation. It's quite similar to that of Yale and Princeton, two schools that Cornell badly out-recruits.

Yale and Princeton are not in the Boston area to attract those Massachusetts prep school kids, do not have Harvard's hockey history, and ,sorry to say, do not have the aura of Harvard.  If, in fact, you really are "well aware of Harvsrd's academic reputation," you simply don't understand its manifestations.

As I say above, I'm not looking for Cornell to compete for the Massachusetts prep school kids. Sounds like your plan for Cornell to compete with Harvard in recruiting is that there is no plan—we should just give up. Yale won a national title and made the NCAAs 6 out of 8 years in the mid-2010s, by the way.

Right.  And you whined because you were sure it would be a Yale dynasty.  Sorry.  You just don't understand Harvard, how much of a hockey hotbed Boston is compared with New Haven and Princeton, and the pull of Harvard's reputation.  Lastly, your continued whining has really become annoying.

[abmarks]

I'd be curious to know if the coaching staff has any sort of answer for Harvard's recruiting dominance. Our future recruiting looks good, but not Harvard levels of good. What's the plan?

I don't think you have a clue as to where Harvard stands in the pantheon of American universities, rightly or wrongly.  Harvard's yield rate is consistently in the 80-85% range.  Cornell's is 60-65%.  Kids who are accepted to Harvard go there, whether hockey players or not.  Only MIT has a comparable yield rate, and it's a different animal.  We can debate the merits of Harvard's reputation till we're blue in the face, but it is what it is, and it makes recruiting easy.

I think I'm pretty well aware of Harvard's academic reputation. It's quite similar to that of Yale and Princeton, two schools that Cornell badly out-recruits.

Yale and Princeton are not in the Boston area to attract those Massachusetts prep school kids, do not have Harvard's hockey history, and ,sorry to say, do not have the aura of Harvard.  If, in fact, you really are "well aware of Harvsrd's academic reputation," you simply don't understand its manifestations.

As I say above, I'm not looking for Cornell to compete for the Massachusetts prep school kids. Sounds like your plan for Cornell to compete with Harvard in recruiting is that there is no plan—we should just give up. Yale won a national title and made the NCAAs 6 out of 8 years in the mid-2010s, by the way.

Right.  And you whined because you were sure it would be a Yale dynasty.  Sorry.  You just don't understand Harvard, how much of a hockey hotbed Boston is compared with New Haven and Princeton, and the pull of Harvard's reputation.  Lastly, your continued whining has really become annoying.

Completely agreed.

One thing we don't know is whether Cornell even bothers going after the really high end talent or not (instead targeting a level below to find solid 4 year players as mentioned earlier in this thread.)

The only way imo to get more and better talent is to establish a recruiting pipeline into some fertile geography or feeder system.  And the only easy ish way to do that would be to hire a recruiter or asst coach that arrives with those connections.

[BearLover]

I'd be curious to know if the coaching staff has any sort of answer for Harvard's recruiting dominance. Our future recruiting looks good, but not Harvard levels of good. What's the plan?

I don't think you have a clue as to where Harvard stands in the pantheon of American universities, rightly or wrongly.  Harvard's yield rate is consistently in the 80-85% range.  Cornell's is 60-65%.  Kids who are accepted to Harvard go there, whether hockey players or not.  Only MIT has a comparable yield rate, and it's a different animal.  We can debate the merits of Harvard's reputation till we're blue in the face, but it is what it is, and it makes recruiting easy.

I think I'm pretty well aware of Harvard's academic reputation. It's quite similar to that of Yale and Princeton, two schools that Cornell badly out-recruits.

Yale and Princeton are not in the Boston area to attract those Massachusetts prep school kids, do not have Harvard's hockey history, and ,sorry to say, do not have the aura of Harvard.  If, in fact, you really are "well aware of Harvsrd's academic reputation," you simply don't understand its manifestations.

As I say above, I'm not looking for Cornell to compete for the Massachusetts prep school kids. Sounds like your plan for Cornell to compete with Harvard in recruiting is that there is no plan—we should just give up. Yale won a national title and made the NCAAs 6 out of 8 years in the mid-2010s, by the way.

Right.  And you whined because you were sure it would be a Yale dynasty.  Sorry.  You just don't understand Harvard, how much of a hockey hotbed Boston is compared with New Haven and Princeton, and the pull of Harvard's reputation.  Lastly, your continued whining has really become annoying.

But you're a beacon of positivity, yeah? Can't recall you saying a single positive thing in any of your hundreds of posts in the basketball, lacrosse, or football threads over the past 5+ years. Your only post about today's 20-10 lacrosse win was a complaint about how Cornell was playing. Which is par for the course.

Also, why are you lecturing me on the prestige of Harvard or Boston being a hockey hotbed? I acknowledge in my opening post that we aren't going to compete with Harvard for Boston kids. My post is about catching up to Harvard in other places. There are many hockey recruits who don't choose a college based on name prestige. A huge chunk of college hockey players aren't even from the US.

I "whined" about Yale winning the national championship because I don't want our hated rivals to win and because I didn't think it would help Cornell (and there's no evidence it has). There are literally people in this forum who were rooting against Harvard tonight even though them beating Colgate would have given us an NCAA bid. I root for what's best for Cornell. Period.

[CAS]

Cornell's class coming in the fall will include at least 2 drafted commits (Fegaras & Devlin) &
the 2nd highest scoring F (Walsh) & 4th highest scoring D (Robertson) in the USHL.  Plus there are 4 other Cornell commits on the NHL's Central Scouting midterm draft prospects list.  Current recruiting looks really good.

[Trotsky]

We should likely continue to reload talent and stay in the top 4 in the conference.  That gives us a good chance to reach Lake Placid most years (we have reached the SF 18 times in Schafer's 26 seasons).  We have about a 50/50 chance of going to the NC$$ every year (10 times in the 19 seasons since the NC$$ went to 16 teams).  6 of the prior 9 times we advanced to the Regional Final where, rather notably, we have lost the last 5 in a row.

Now throw in that four times in Schafer's tenure we have reached #1 in the country post-January 1 (2003 3/31, 2005 2/28, 2018 1/29, 2020 3/23). In three other seasons we reached as high as #5 after New Year's (2006 3 2/6, 2009 3 1/19, 2010 5 2/1).  That's seven seasons of 27 reaching top 5 -- once every full four year class.

I don't know if things will change after Mike retires or we will simply go on with that same high level as we did with Harkness and Bertrand over a 20-year interval.  We may flail a bit and then right the ship or we may transition cleanly.  But I am quite happy with our level of performance and success.  We are typically in a position to reach the top of the conference and challenge to go deep into the post-season.  One can always wish for more, but 50+ of the 61 D-1 programs wish they had our recruiting track record.

[Pghas]

We are generally an exceptionally well coached team whose defensive style and reliance on elite goaltending makes us more akin to a 1990s New Jersey Devils team than anything else. I think that's fine. I think that it may turn off some of the more elite offensive prospects, which may hurt us. But I think the years when we do you have elite offensive players, like Morgan Barron, we are a much bigger threat to go far. And in looking at our stats over the last 20 years, it is also important to remember that the one year that we really had a great shot at winning the whole thing was cut short and ruined by the pandemic in 2020.  That not only gravely impacted how we view the organization over the last 20 to 30 years, but also has a significant impact on recruiting in the years since and going forward.

[The Rancor]

We are generally an exceptionally well coached team whose defensive style and reliance on elite goaltending makes us more akin to a 1990s New Jersey Devils team than anything else. I think that's fine. I think that it may turn off some of the more elite offensive prospects, which may hurt us. But I think the years when we do you have elite offensive players, like Morgan Barron, we are a much bigger threat to go far. And in looking at our stats over the last 20 years, it is also important to remember that the one year that we really had a great shot at winning the whole thing was cut short and ruined by the pandemic in 2020.  That not only gravely impacted how we view the organization over the last 20 to 30 years, but also has a significant impact on recruiting in the years since and going forward.

I agree. As long as Schafer is Coach, the team will be built from the back out. Elite scoring is something you just can't teach, the guys who have the touch, the nose for the net, just get it done. But for the ones like Barron, or Moulson or any of the other great Big Red that came in the Mike Schafer era, they all needed something to make them more well rounded, better players, because they all were missing "something" which is why they weren't top 10, first round drafts and weren't playing at BU, Michigan or Wisconsin etc. Dedicated to academics? Maybe. But if you can score and play solid defense, it makes up for being slow, or too small, or whatever it is that kept them out of Major Juniors or the top list for scouts.