New England Hockey Journal Replica Sample - 14

Harvard Crimson

Continued from Page 13

Forced by NCAA bylaws to
abandon a locker room drowning in pathos, the Crimson
captains endured the toughest
exam of the college careers - articulating their shattered dreams
before a national press corps.
"It's tough to find words right
now," said Tringale, who soldiered on nevertheless. "We're
all pretty heartbroken. Looking
back, it was an absolute honor
to wear a Harvard jersey the
past four years, the best four
years of my life. It's meant everything to me."
With a faltering voice, Kerfoot echoed his mate. "Obviously, it was heartbreaking
when they scored that goal with
26 seconds left. Everything was
happening so fast. We had opportunities to score at the end,
hit a couple posts, took it to
them. It wasn't meant to be."
Mercifully, hockey's corporate suits let the young captains
return to their teary room. Harvard coach Ted Donato (Dedham, Mass.), a man who has experienced the highs and lows at
every level of this sport, did his
best to sort out the carnage.
"The end was so sudden, hitting the post three times in the
last 25 seconds," said Donato.
"The emotions, the love in the
locker room, it's really tough to
swallow right now, because these
guys have really given their all,
all year, not only of themselves,
but to their teammates. This will
be an incredibly special group,
in my mind, forever."
By "the group," Donato was
referring to his gang of seven,
the seniors who had brought the
Crimson from the insulting role
of local insignificance to Beanpot champions, overwhelming
the heralded BU Terriers. How,
exactly, had this group accomplished that?
"I think we started to hold
ourselves to a higher standard,"
said the coach. "I thought that
this group in particular, and last
year's group, guys like (Jimmy)
Vesey (North Reading, Mass.)
and (Kyle) Criscuolo, along with
guys like Kerfoot and Tringale,
and Malone and Esposito, it's
just a group that really accepted
the responsibility of setting really high goals."
Not coincidentally, former
Navy Seal Adam La Reau arrived on campus as a first-year

 Riley Tufte of the MinnesotaDuluth Bulldogs bumps into
Harvard goalie Merrick Madsen
as Jake Horton defends during
the 2017 Frozen Four semifinals.

grad student at the Kennedy
School of Government in the
fall of 2013, directly across the
Charles River from the BrightLandry Center. Through a friend
of a friend, La Reau forged an
important relationship with Donato and his charges as a motivational consultant. La Reau
discovered a team that needed
help getting on the same page.
"I sent out a list of questions to try to get to know everybody a little bit better," said
La Reau. He wanted to know if
the players truly believed in the
program. "If I'm the number
one recruit in the nation, why
would I want to go to Harvard
University? I didn't get a really
good answer from anybody. We
worked on it; it's about embracing the challenges of Harvard."
From there, La Reau went
to work with the freshmen that
would blossom into the superb
leaders of the 2016-17 season of
redemption. "I just help them
put together a framework to
think about goals. They did all
the hard work. It was just me
honing the discussion with the

14 NEW ENGLAND HOCKEY JOURNAL May 2017

captains leading it, and the rest
of the team contributing."
Specifically, La Reau, who
is not a hockey man, worked
through a "chain of command"
to devise hockey-specific goals:
shots, shots allowed, faceoffs
won and the like, and then getting the team to buy in. More importantly, La Reau got the team
to communicate effectively
with each other, again using the
militaristic chain of command:
coach, to captains, to players.
When Harvard's fabulous run
through the 2016-17 was nearly
harpooned in January, losing
consecutively to RPI, Union and
Dartmouth, La Reau had systems in place to stanch bleeding from the three-game losing
streak, a streak that could have
hemorrhaged in previous years.
"They had an effective debriefing," said La Reau who
remembered the postmortem
pow-wows after those losses.
"We had an effective way to
talk to each other, a culture of
accountability and debriefing
bred into their system. When
they lost those three games

in a row, there was nothing to
change. The system was already
in place. They already knew
what was going right, they already knew what they needed to
improve on. Nothing changed
from those three games than it
did from the first game, than it
did leading up to this one."
La Reau was speaking from
his seat at United Center, two
sections over from Messier.
It was no coincidence that La
Reau's chain of command included Messier's nephew Esposito, the only non-captain in
the second tier. Esposito's regal
blood line was not lost on La
Reau. "It doesn't surprise me at
all; he's a phenomenal player."
Despite being engaged in
a grinding game against the
taller and heavier Bulldogs in
the national semifinal, Harvard
swung the momentum back in
the second period by winning
50-50 puck battles and controlled long stretches of the
game in the third.
"It's pure grit on their part,"
said La Reau, contradicting
a common stereotype about

Crimson teams of the past. "Perseverance, drive. They're laserfocused right now on the goals
that they set; they're a tough
team, a really tough team."
La Reau returned his attention to the contest that was uncomfortably tense, though not
graceful. He watched the fleet
Kerfoot get hauled down from
behind on a breakaway and grimaced at the non-call. The call
irked coach Donato. "I was expecting a penalty shot," he said
in the corridors after the sanctioned press conference. "And
we didn't even get a minor."
Ironically, the NCAA now
provides a new stat sheet in
its postgame package - a detailed account of every "gradeA chance." The 13th item on the
list reveals Kerfoot getting one
of Harvard's precious chances
with 3:22 remaining in the second, and the exact NCAA verbiage reads as follows: "Breakaway, tripped in slot."
As the game reached its harrowing conclusion, Moy found
himself in a death battle at the halfboards with a slew of Bulldogs. He
battled for nearly 10 seconds before surrendering the puck at the
blue line. Bulldog freshman Joey
Anderson corralled the loose biscuit and fired it cross-ice, where
Harvard was victimized by a twoon-one down low.
Less than 27 ticks remained,
and the Crimson appeared disheartened. Yet somehow Donato's Crimson generated not one
but two more grade-A chances,
none more glorious than Esposito's magic bullet.
Walking out to the bus for the
unexpected exit from the Frozen
Four, sophomore Ryan Donato
(Scituate, Mass.) reflected on the
final game of Harvard's Magnificent Seven. "They put their blood,
heart, sweat, they really put in everything they could," said Donato. "It's really heartbreaking. As a
sophomore we wanted it, but we
especially wanted it for the seniors. They turned the program
around, and they did everything
they could. It was tough that it
had to end that way."
Then the sophomore showed
wisdom beyond his 21 years. "I
think at the end what matters is
the friendships and the memories we had along the way with
them."
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