Re: Harvard Crimson (again) 2018-19
You raise another very good point. While Flygh's performance at Yale was deemed not good enough by the new AD to save his job
(28W-52L-11T past 3 seasons), Stone's remarkably similar record for Harvard in the same time frame of 29W-48L-12T is actually far more incriminating as she's rostered 9-10 National Team players each of those seasons. While one could argue that anyone can have a bad year, wasting proven talent year after year should be a huge red flag to any AD who's paying attention. You would never know, watching some of the games this season, that the Crimson had anywhere near that kind of talent. The often looked lethargic and uninterested. Without Reed to backstop, the record would have been abysmal.
Like Murphy at Brown a few years back, Stone is long past her expiry date: her style just doesn't work anymore as results in recent years clearly show. She's undoubtedly the beneficiary to date of the fact that, unlike Beckett at Yale, Scalise has not yet announced his retirement as AD. Too often, as appears to be the case here, longstanding ADs tend to be blinded by sentimentality and cozy relationships with longstanding coaches, rather than making any objective assessment of their abilities and results.
Harvard should have higher standards. Sad.
I don’t want to end the season letting this stand unaddressed, especially since I know you, of all people, are not a troll.
“Her style just doesn’t work anymore.”
The 2016-17 Crimson had lost Maschmeyer, Picard, Parker and D’Oench to graduation and were left with the most mediocre roster in recent memory, certainly on the blue line. Harvard went 5-19-5, the worst record of Katy Stone’s career. But that team also ended up playing
ten OTs, including
seven against nationally ranked teams, in which they went 0-3-4. That season did not come from a coach in decline.
“Harvard should have higher standards. Sad.”
Higher standards, sad though it might seem, can mean more than win/loss records, and often include those of institutional loyalty, built on history and performance. They also implicitly allow for down times. But also implicit in long-standing trusted relationships is the understanding that an employee of a certain stature will know when the time comes to call it quits. This calls for one side to have the grace and the other side to have the integrity to live with that timing. There’s no good reason to question either.
Regarding Stone’s present team, my fan clock sees next year as the culmination of a three-year rebuild, which seems to be moving ahead. But the incoming recruits will be critical. New line additions will have to unleash Hughes, Gilmore, Jovanovich, Petrie, and KDR to make scoring a habit, not just a happenstance. And we need D! We have some young talent, but Ds seem to take forever to develop (why is that?), and we need a real blueliner, or two, from day one. It would be criminal to have a .500 team in front of Reed for the next three years. But Lethargy? Indifference? I haven’t seen it, and with Fusco and Laing on the ice it would have been hard to get away with. Fatigue, maybe, especially with the past few seasons’ i
nvoluntary short benches. And yes, there’s been more than enough poor play, but mostly from those whose trajectory has been downward, which happens, however Machiavellian the recruiting. But I’m going to give it a few more years before putting in a call to Josh McDaniels . . . er, I mean Maura Crowell. (Personally, I wouldn’t trust Lee-J in the Beanpot
)
) intermission talk about (I think) the magic of the Beanpot. It’s what all freshmen, whatever their origins, come to appreciate.
And for Corriero's final year, there was Vaillancourt as well. But Corriero scored 150 goals in her career. At a certain point, a team had to take her away and make the Crimson find a goal somewhere else. But, yeah, that was a hard line to try to match up against.