Women's hockey strives for respectability

Fueled by new players and attitudes, the Elis push to improve a struggling program

By Anna Dolinsky

Coming off of one of its worst seasons ever, the Yale women's ice hockey team is primed to make a change for the better. The Elis are facing another year of tough Ivy League games, grueling practices, and possible heartbreak. Despite not having won an Ivy game since 1988, this year they are armed with cautious optimism, a desire to work hard, and seven brand new players.

"We haven't had a good season here [at Yale] yet," Head Coach John Marchetti said. With seven incoming freshmen on this year's team, Marchetti has his work cut out for him. "With so many young and inexperienced players, we really have to figure what we have. At this point, I am still assessing all my players' abilities," he said. "We have to develop team chemistry, build confidence, get out on the ice, and get an idea of who we are."

Marchetti only lost two players from last year, but because of the team's youth he will have to concentrate on the basics in the near future. "We will be dealing with fundamentals: a lot of conditioning and working out new systems that complement the team's skills. It's not going to be easy to prepare, but I'm excited about what might happen," he said.

The old and the new

"How do you learn to survive at Yale?" Marchetti asked. "You go out there and get experience. Same with hockey. We have to get out on the ice, make mistakes, and learn from them. It's always tough for coaches. I don't want to make predictions and then have them blow up in my face. You have to be conservative. But I am cautiously optimistic. I think my goal is to be a better team at the end of this season than we were at the end of last season."

Marchetti's players are also "cautiously optimistic." With their first game coming up at home against Providence on Sat., Nov. 6, the team is working on the fundamentals, intermediate drills, defensive zone coverage, and special plays. There is immense individual talent among the 24 players, but because of the their relative youth and inexperience at the collegiate level, the team needs time to play together and adjust to each other's styles.

"I think one of our main goals as a team is to play well as a unit at this point in time. And obviously win an Ivy League game—its been way too long," Lauren Gulka, BK '01, said. "We aren't going to go nuts for an ECAC [Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference] title right now, but to be a cohesive unit is a great start."

Marchetti sees his older, more experienced players as the key to team success. "The older players must assume more responsibility. They have to step it up and lead the team because they know what to expect," he said.

Kaitlin Porcaro, SY '03, one of the team's seven freshmen, sees herself as an equal partner with the more experienced players. "I think that the other six freshmen and myself have a lot to contribute to the team and on the team, but we obviously can't do it alone and the upperclassmen can't do it alone," she said.

Compared with previous seasons, this year's team has much more depth and a fuller bench. That means better defensive and offensive lines and more substitutions. "We finally have enough people to scrimmage in practice," Captain Juliana Schantz-Dunn, CC '00, said. There is also a sense of enthusiasm and expectancy, especially from the newer players.

Schantz-Dunn agreed that the team has the potential to pull together and succeed. "I'd say we are preparing to take the league by surprise," she said. "If anyone is thinking about our past seasons, it's our opponents—we are only looking ahead, with enthusiasm and excitement. As a senior, I feel like it is our year to move up in the league and be really successful."

The season to forget

No one on the team wants to dwell too much on last sea-son's disastrous finish. Gulka prefers to focus on the team's op-portunities for improvement. "We realize we went through rough years," she said, "but our program has made such vast improvement in such a short periods of time, that even if our statistics haven't shown it, we have become so much better in the last couple of years. The only way to go here is up and that is the direction we are headed. We aren't in a rut, we are in a rebuilding stage."

Schantz-Dunn didn't even want to comment on her junior season. "Although we didn't have a winning season, we did improve and did better than the year before," she said. "This year is a new year focusing on what happened last year isn't going to make us more competitive now. We need to look ahead. There's a lot of optimism on the team." Schantz-Dunn, along with the rest of the team, expects to be extremely aggressive in the league and can virtually taste the first Ivy win.

"Optimism is a good word," Gulka agreed. "I don't think that any of us have unrealistic expectations. We realize that we are a far better team than we have been in the past, but we also realize that it takes time to get used to playing together."

In both coach and player comments, the same themes come up repeatedly: looking ahead with cautious optimism is the official team attitude, just as finding the right team chemistry is their immediate goal. "Working harder and harder each time we step out on the ice is the way we'll win games," Gulka said.

For Marchetti, no game last season was a total loss. "There is no one significant factor that we need to change," he said. He sees his experiences from the past three years as a continual process of building up the program. "We play one game at a time and learn from all of them. We reach for lofty goals but maintain a realistic attitude. There's always a kink in every team; we just have to keep working and playing."

The season to come

Yale women's hockey will go up against some tough opponents in their 29 games this season, including top-ranked Dartmouth, Harvard, Brown, and Niagara. Many of the teams Yale will face in the next few weeks will already have four or five games under their belts; Ivy League policy prohibits Yale from playing those extra games during the season.

"We will be playing the same teams as last year," Marchetti explained. "Although we have definitely improved, so have they."

"We'll do a little better than last year and move up a little bit in the rankings," he predicted.

Gulka is a bit more confident about the team's prospects for the upcoming season. "I am really excited for this season," she said. "Even if we don't accomplish tremendous statistics and an amazing record, I have no doubt in my mind that this season will be the best season Yale's women's hockey has seen in a while. When March rolls around, I'm sure every player on our team will be satisfied with our success —if we aren't, we will only have our own selves to blame for not giving 100 percent. Because if we do that, there is nowhere we can go but up."

Marchetti sees everything lining up. "We have incredible support, second to none, from the entire Yale community. We have all our tools, we just have to figure out how to use them."

"I am looking forward to this season," Porcaro agreed. "It is a brand new team and a time to prove ourselves. As long as we play as a team and keep up our enthusiasm and hard work, Yale is going to make people turn their heads and think twice when they are getting ready to play us."

The tools of hard work, cautious optimism, and seven new, talented players are ready to take Yale women's hockey back to the upper reaches of the ECAC. The infusion of youth will serve the Elis well for years to come. And we'll see on Saturday if the Elis are ready to make their move now.

Photo of Sara Wood, SM '02, by Julia Tiernan.

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