Harvard Sweeps Rensselaer in Season Opener

It took three minutes and 11 seconds for Harvard’s returning Olympians to register a point each for the women’s hockey team.

It took just fewer than 57 more minutes for them to notch an additional 13 points and the first win of the 2006-2007 season.

Sophomore Sarah Vaillancourt, fresh from her gold-medal run with Team Canada at the Torino Winter Games, scored the first and last goal in a 11-0 romp over Division-I newbie Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) at Bright Hockey Center on Saturday. The Crimson finished with a flurry of scoring, netting six scores in the final frame and overwhelming the Engineers (1-7-0, 0-1-0) in RPI’s first-ever ECAC game.

“RPI fought to the end and that is the most important thing,” Harvard coach Katey Stone said. “If we were playing against a team that didn’t—they just sort of laid down and died—it would be a different story. There were still opportunities to make good plays and execute. We ended up making some tremendous plays and executing.”

Vaillancourt netted the first goal with just fewer than 18 minutes left in the opening period after picking up a rebound on the powerplay. She alertly used her stick-handling to throw off the goalie before dumping the puck in the net. The last goal was almost all Vaillancourt, as she beat three RPI defenders and Engineers goalie Ashley Mayr.

Vaillancourt added another goal and five assists in between, leading mates Julie Chu, a senior, and sophomore Jenny Brine on the Crimson’s first line.

“We have been practicing for awhile and really emphasizing talking to each other,” said Vaillancourt of the line. “We talk a lot during practices and when we come back to the bench we talk. We’re not at our top yet—the passes are still not perfect—but we will get there.”

“[Chu] and [Vaillancourt] pretty much just picked up where they left off,” Stone said. “They have gotten Jenny Brine playing at a level that she was not playing at last year. And frankly, anybody who plays with them is going to raise their game. But she is doing a nice job staying with them.”

For Harvard as a whole, the first period was solid, but the second and third periods were when it overwhelmed the weaker competition. In the first frame, the Crimson outshot RPI eight to six. From the twenty minute mark on, however, Harvard peppered the Engineers net with 36 shots, eventually forcing the team’s coach, John Burke, to change goalies.

In their first action of the season, the Crimson’s special teams units also played well. Harvard netted four goals in its six man-advantage opportunities, all coming from the first line. On the defensive side, all six of RPI’s powerplays were killed effectively, limiting the Engineers to five shots.

But the area that was identified as a work-in-progress by Stone and her players after the game was the defensive unit. Although RPI was held to 15 shots and did not manage a goal, there were moments in the final period when the Crimson could not manage to keep control of the puck and clear it out of its zone.

“We need to work really on our defensive zone for sure,” Vaillancourt said. “That definitely needs to improve. Also, some stuff on the face-offs—defensive face-offs and offensive face-offs. We need to keep building; we have a lot of things to work on.”

Some of the other areas in which Harvard’s early season issues were clear were in bench management—particularly in the change from special teams units—and in not holding the puck too long through the middle. A number of times, the Crimson lost possession of the puck because of its more skilled players’ overuse of fakes and stick-handling tricks.

In the end, the result was quite positive, and the 11-0 win the team’s largest margin of victory since the beginning of the 30-4-1 season two years ago.

Chu finished with two goals and five points overall, while Brine had a hat trick and assisted on Vaillancourt’s second score. Sophomores Kati Vaughn and Sarah Wilson also netted goals for Harvard.

Stone added that while the Crimson overran the Engineers, part of the reason was that the Harvard needed to use the pressure and situations of a real game to keep testing itself.

“You just can’t let up the gas...this is just our first chance,” she said. “I like what I saw. We are still trying to figure it out. We have so much internal competition right now and that is driving our momentum. You can’t ask somebody who is trying to stay on a dress list to let up. We have to play at a high pace all the time and let these kids experiment.”

With two of the top teams in the ECAC on the horizon next week in St. Lawrence and Clarkson, the Crimson needs to have the details figured out as soon as possible.

—Staff writer Gabriel M. Velez can be reached at gmvelez@fas.harvard.edu.