Jon writes:
>>Seems to me that Ned Harkness was also involved with Union College hockey in
>>the late 1970s when the team was interested in moving up to division I.  If I
>>remember correctly, they had the invitation from the ECAC, but the invitation
>>was turned down by the president (and maybe the faculty) of Union.  After
>>that, Harkness and most of the team resigned from Union.
>
>This is correct.  Achilles Rink was built to bring college hockey back
>to Union.  Harkness was brought in with great fanfare to build a
>program.  He had tremendous success.  If I remember correctly, in only
>his second season his team beat nationally ranked UNH.  However, he
>claimed that the school promised when they hired him that the team would
>be allowed to move up to Division I.  The school denied this and
>Harkness quit in mid-season.  Virtually his entire team quit with him.
 
There's a bit more to the story of Harkness' departure than this.  The Union
administration never directly said they were interested in moving up to
Division I; in fact, there were numerous faculty who said that was exactly
what they did NOT want the team to do.  Harkness was pushing for Division I
status, and the ECAC was interested, but although the league looked into
moving Union up from Division II, no formal invitation was made before Hark-
ness left.  Ironically, Union's strong performances against Division I
competition only made the faculty more adamant about not moving up -- they
didn't want the school to become a sports factory.
 
As Jon mentions, Harkness broke a New England Small College Athletic
Conference rule prohibiting coaches from visiting with recruits.  This
happened in the spring of 1977, and when then-Union president Thomas Bonner
confronted Harkness with the allegations, Harkness lied and said he had not
visited the recruit.  A few days later, Harkness admitted to lying, and
said, "I did it to save my team."  Well, he was suspended by Bonner but
almost immediately reinstated by the Union board of trustees.
 
The faculty were outraged by this, and they voted no confidence in Bonner,
who then submitted his resignation to the trustees.  The trustees voted not
to accept it at first, but Bonner eventually left the college.  Meanwhile,
the faculty-run admissions committee turned down four hockey recruits,
saying they were "academically inadequate".  That was a bit suspicious,
since all four of them wound up going to Ivy League schools instead.  When
four more players were suspended in December 1977 for academic reasons,
Harkness resigned, saying that his team was being harassed (the four players
were not notified of their suspensions until after their names were made
public) and that the school had reneged on promises to support the hockey
program.
 
This whole mess was a big part of the reason that the Union administration
placed so many restrictions on the team when it finally moved up to Division
I last year (only 25 games, no on-ice practice until a week or two before
the beginning of the season, and so on).  Once again, the issue of the
college becoming a sports factory came up, and Coach Delventhal and his
staff had to make a number of reassurances to the faculty that that was not
what they were trying to do.
--
Bill Fenwick
Cornell '86 and probably '94
LET'S GO RED!!
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