AMHERST — In the blink of an eye, Greg Carvel’s transformational recruiting class has grown another year older.
The cornerstone group behind UMass’ improvement from five wins to national runner-up in a span of two years can no longer be considered just a bunch of youngsters. The freshmen who took Hockey East by storm two seasons ago in Carvel’s second year are now juniors, but those eight players have probably experienced more than most players who are in their third season of college hockey.
They were thrown into the fire from the beginning and forced to skate heavy minutes for a team that Carvel was still trying to mold in his image. They were being asked to do things normally reserved for players who get drafted into the NHL before they arrive in college and grew from those challenges. Now they’re a battle-tested class ready to lead the fourth-ranked Minutemen into the future where no one underestimates them.
“Now that those kids are juniors, I feel like they’ve been here for six years,” Carvel said. “They’ve all played important minutes, I mean, (Oliver) Chau, (Mitchell) Chaffee and (Jake) Gaudet have been our first line for three years and they look great on the ice. Then our second line has (Philip) Lagunov and (John) Leonard, so that class continues to be extremely important to our success. I imagine that every member of that class will continue to be really good players and important in our success.”
Of course the junior class lost two critical members after last season in Hobey Baker Award-winning defenseman Cale Makar, who didn’t skip a beat after he signed with the Colorado Avalanche, and equally strong defenseman Mario Ferraro, who was still in training camp with the San Jose Sharks as of Monday morning. Not only will their skills on the ice be missed, but their departure left a void in leadership in the locker room. Ferraro was arguably the emotional leader for the Minutemen last year and Makar was the strong, silent leader who commanded the locker room when he did decide to speak up.
In their absence, the rest of their classmates have taken up the call and taken their leadership to a new level. Although Carvel has created a culture of self-accountability at UMass, Gaudet said he and his classmates clearly have felt the need to become more vocal as well with the rest of the team and claim a larger role in steering the team within the locker room.
“Guys like Chaffee, Chau and myself with the absence of Cale and Mario, we’ve had to step into more of a leadership role,” Gaudet said. “But part of the culture that we’ve built here at UMass is that everybody’s a leader, everybody takes cares of their own business, there’s no gaps, there’s no guys lagging behind, so (our class) is ready to step forward and take on a bigger role.”
The junior class is far from the only vocal leaders on the team, however. Senior Niko Hildenbrand returns this year and will again wear the captain’s “C” on his jersey with a year of experience in understanding when and what to say to get Carvel’s message across.
He said the freshmen’s acclimation to the team has been the smoothest it’s ever been in large part because of how much the team has matured since last season concluded.
“As soon as we got here this summer, you could feel it,” Hildenbrand said. “Especially with so many older guys now and there’s so many more leaders on this team and guys feel comfortable with stepping up and being in those leadership roles, it will just add to the team this year and make us that much better.”
RECRUITING BOOST — When Carvel and his staff began recruiting many of the freshmen who eventually arrived in Amherst this summer, UMass was still a middling team. The Minutemen were fresh off their five-win season when the process began and then many of the recruits watched the massive improvement the team took in year two.
UMass didn’t start proving itself as a national title threat until after the commitments started to roll in, and all of a sudden, the freshmen aren’t joining the same program that began recruiting them. Carvel said some of the freshmen were even more nervous now to arrive because they knew the expectations for the team had been raised by last year’s result.
But as Carvel continues to look ahead in discovering and recruiting the future classes of Minutemen, the tangible perks of last season’s Hockey East winning season and subsequent run to the national title game are evident.
“Most of our recruiting is done through relationships and reputation, so as the program builds a stronger reputation, you’ve got kids who are willing to come visit who wouldn’t before,” Carvel said. “The bottom line is when you have the success that we had last year, you start talking to levels of kids who wouldn’t talk to us before.”