Tony writes (about Ned Harkness):
>Amongst his ploys were:  whenever a very fast team would come to the field
>house, somehow the ice machine wouldn't work as well, turning the ice into
>a pile of mush, effectively neutralizing team speeds!!  Or maybe the
>building heater was a bit warmer than usual..... or whatever it took.
>
> [...]
>
>Anyone else of that era who knows of the Harkness myths along this line?
>Needless to say, when he got to Cornell, built his team and came back to
>the field house, it didn't need any of that stuff to be the hell out of
>the Engineers and everyone else, but I wasn't there to see that slaughter,
 
This is well before my time, but I have read various accounts about Ned
Harkness and the RPI and Cornell teams he coached during the '60s.  And as I
recall, the Albany/Troy area media had a field day at one point when Ned
came back to RPI with a bigger, faster Cornell team, and -- you guessed
it -- complained because the ice was too mushy!
 
And while I'm at it... Ralph writes:
>Cornell's main advantage at the time was that despite being an Ivy
>league school, it had majors where it was easier to get people accepted
>than at RPI.  (I can see the flames coming now :-) )
 
Not a flame, but more of a clarification.  Cornell had (and has) an agri-
cultural college, which was considered by many rivals to be an excellent
tool to use in attracting Canadian players.  Ned Harkness referred to this
himself once in a backhanded way, when the Big Red was the dominant team in
the East (late '60s) and some rival coaches were taking him to task for
possibly circumventing the stringent Ivy League academic requirements by
stashing his Canadian players in the Ag school.  Harkness' response was
something along the lines of, "If we bring in somebody from a farm in
Ontario, what do you expect him to study?  Physics?"
 
It's odd how you never hear anything about the supposed advantage of
Cornell's ag school now that the Big Red is a middling ECAC team...
 
P.S.  The scholarship schools in the ECAC are Clarkson, RPI, and Vermont.
      During/after the split that produced Hockey East, there was supposedly
      some drive by the Ivies to get the other schools to give up athletic
      scholarships -- obviously, that didn't happen.
--
Disclaimer -- Unless otherwise noted, all opinions expressed above are
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Bill Fenwick                        |  Send your HOCKEY-L poll responses to:
Cornell '86 and '94.5               |  [log in to unmask]
LET'S GO RED!!                                                  DJF  5/27/94
"I had a terrible time in college, until I finally figured out what my
 problem was.  I had been highlighting with a black magic marker."
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