The average college hockey fan wouldn’t view Jean-Francois Houle’s career path for a potential return to his alma mater.
The former Clarkson scoring wizard in the 1990s returned to the Golden Knights after ending his on-ice career but jumped on an arc within earshot of a bench boss job within the NHL. He spent five years in the QMJHL before ascending to the AHL’s Laval Rocket, who rewarded him in May with a contract extension for the main development pipeline to one of hockey’s tent-pole franchises.
Pointing him back to Potsdam for a head coaching vacancy at Clarkson was nothing short of a college hockey coup, but three weeks after Montreal confirmed his status for the Rocket, he mutually parted ways to become head coach of the Golden Knights.
Almost immediately, a smooth coaching change pointed a rebooting team towards its upwards swing, to which hope and expectation, those fickle attributes merged and melded more often at Clarkson than most places, are once again aligning after tasting success in the first seven games.
“We’re playing with confidence right now,” said Houle of his team, which swept Michigan Tech this past weekend to improve to 5-2 on the year. “Ethan Langenegger made some big saves for us over the weekend. It was hard to play up [on the Upper Peninsula], but I think our players responded pretty well. There were a lot of good teaching moments; we had some penalty trouble, so our penalty kill and special teams, the power play, were excellent, but we had good teaching moments for our club.”
Clarkson entered this season by turning the corner from the unexpected downswing that began in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The two-time NCAA tournament participants won a Whitelaw Cup as ECAC’s postseason champion in 2019, but a third-straight appearance on the national stage unexpectedly ended when the pandemic broke out during the 2020 postseason. Instantaneously, a 23-win team and second place finisher behind No. 1 Cornell lost its shot at a national championship, after which the 2020-2021 team was eliminated from the four-team when the novel coronavirus canceled its participation.
The 2021-22 team returned to form by winning 21 games, but relative weaknesses surrounding ECAC’s return to a full 12-team complement sent the second place Golden Knights onto the wrong side of the Pairwise Rankings’ bubble when they lost their semifinal matchup to a Harvard team that later knocked them out of the tournament with a 3-2 win in the conference championship game.
None of that signaled a warning to Clarkson that the good times atop the league fast approached their end, but the 16-win team from 2022-23 coupled with a fifth place finish last year to create a cyclical event perceptively in line with a league featuring rising teams at Dartmouth, which finished one point ahead of the Golden Knights for fourth place, and Colgate, which nipped one point behind second place Cornell.
Both would have finished tied or within one game of Clarkson under older scoring rules, which likewise would have moved the Big Red within four points – or one weekend’s work – of sending the fifth-place team into second.
Nothing rocked the proverbial boat on the program, and even changing coaches over this offseason appeared ridiculously smooth after Jones left to create a succession plan with retiring Cornell head coach Mike Schafer. Few players left for greener pastures in the transfer portal, and arrivals from Langenegger, Ryan Bottrill, Garrett Dahm and Ray Fust bolstered an incoming recruiting class already identified for particular systems.
“It was smooth because ‘Jonesy’ went to his alma mater while I went to my alma mater,” Houle noted. “I’ve known him and the team through their success over the past five or six years, so there wasn’t much turnover. The two assistants that were here – Chris Brooks and Cory Scheider – have been awesome. They’ve been really good in retaining the players that were here and retaining some of the recruits that we had, so that made it a smoother transition for me, and it’s just been good to be back in this environment, trying to teach some young players how to be good players and good citizens.”
The whole process somehow blended continuity into change, and Clarkson launched into its season with a 2-2 start after splitting home wins over Canisius and Niagara with losses to RIT and Notre Dame. None of those games successfully produced the full 60-minute effort desired by the coaching staff, but the first period leads against Canisius and Notre Dame contrasted mightily with the closeout issues against RIT and the slow start against Niagara.
In particular, the Knights needed to gel, and the first road trip to Vermont illustrated a massive step forward when the defense blocked 17 shots in a 3-1 comeback win that spilled into last weekend’s sweep over Michigan Tech. A return of sorts for Langenegger, who played at Lake Superior State before moving east, Clarkson stormed forward against the Huskies by gaining goals from freshmen Ty Brassington and Jack Sparkes in a 4-1 victory.
One night later, Clarkson earned its first weekend road sweep over the same opponent in four years when it earned a 2-1 overtime winner with 17 seconds remaining in the extra period.
“It’s kind of normal to have a little bit of a slow start on the road,” Houle emphasized. “But once you find your feet, you start playing better as the second and third periods go on. You get more comfortable, and the details of the game get better as the game goes on. We had the opposite against Notre Dame at Clarkson where we lost in the third, so this is all part of great teaching moments for our players, win or lose. I believe you need those teaching moments for your team to progress.”
It’s through those lenses that Clarkson is starting to knock on its return to the national polls. Thirty-one vote points were good enough to place the Golden Knights 23rd among Division I programs, and the virtual tie with Omaha is pushing them to a place that hasn’t been seen since the start of the 2022-23 season. The No. 18 team at the start of the year, two straight losses to Hockey East teams dropped the Golden Knights out of the polls, but reasons are increasingly putting them on the map for national voters as ECAC play looms in the middle of November.
“There’s a lot of parity,” said Houle. “The league, on any given night, anybody can win. At the end of the day, it’s played on the ice, so when the puck drops, it’s the team that works the hardest that will probably win. For me, competing for the full 60 minutes is very, very important.
“It’s the emphasis that we put on our players right now because the ECAC is a tough league to play in. You have to be ready because one little mistake or a mental mistake, could end up in the back of your net.”
Clarkson hosts Alaska for two games this weekend at Cheel Arena before Stonehill makes a one-game trek to the North Country on Nov. 9 ahead of the first weekend of ECAC play at Rensselaer and Union’s Capital District arenas.
