The history of Dartmouth College’s men’s hockey program is written in long winters and longer memories, in the echoes of skates cutting through Thompson Arena and the weight of decades that are passed through the generations. One of college hockey’s original Frozen Four teams, the Big Green are often referenced through their shared history among Ivy League opponents and seldom recognized as one of the sport’s sleeping giants.
Few moments resonate larger than 1980 and an NCAA Tournament featuring a Dartmouth program that surged to the ECAC Tournament finals after winning the conference’s Ivy Region regular season championship. Third place finishers after defeating Cornell in the aftermath of a national semifinal loss to North Dakota, it’s a touchstone of pride for players who pull on the green-and-white sweater because it’s the most recent of four national tournament berths.
Now, for the first time in generations, the chase to break Dartmouth’s 46-year tournament drought feels tangible. More than ever, the Big Green are in the mix of an NCAA Tournament algorithm that’s favoring their renewed confidence and modern depth, but beyond the doubts or national expectations expecting the team to backslide through the national rankings exists a roster that’s built on its internal belief system and the burgeoning names that are ranking among the nation’s best skaters.
“We strive every day to be the best version of ourselves,” said forward Hayden Stavroff. “All of the wins throughout the season mean nothing if you can’t execute when playing in an elimination game later in the year. So as a team, we’re taking everything day-by-day, so we can go into the playoffs by playing the best hockey that we can possibly play, which will put us in a position to succeed.”
Stavroff scored three times during Dartmouth’s five-point weekend against Clarkson and St. Lawrence, a run that stretched him to five goals in his past three games after he twice beat Harvard in the Big Green’s 5-4 win over their Ivy League rival. Now at 20 goals on the season, he’s one of two players atop the national lead and one of two ECAC players with 30 overall points. Both numbers reached their respective levels faster than any Dartmouth skater over the past 20 years.
Somewhat ironically, the last 30-goal scorer occurred when Ross Brownridge scored 30 times during that eponymous 1979-1980 season, but there hasn’t been a 40-point scorer since David Jones, Lee Stempniak and Mike Ouellette barely missed the NCAA Tournament in the mid-2000s.
“We have guys like Hank Cleaves, who is naturally a center,” said Cashman, “so his game is more of a distribution, even though he can shoot the puck and can score goals. But he has this size that gets people close to him to get the puck away, but he has this reach and skill with this hockey IQ that allows him to make all of these different passes. Hayden is right in the middle of that mindset, where Hank wants to get Hayden the puck, and Hayden has the mindset that if he gets the puck, he’s putting it under the bar.
“Now that said, we had a situation against Princeton where three guys came at Hayden in the first period and he made a chip pass to Hank that you or I could have scored,” he continued, “so he can pass, too. But seeing those two work together and play off their strengths, they’re also roommates who really like each other. Then we add Cam MacDonald to that mix as the perfect
complement to those guys because he can skate and is going to be the first guy into the forecheck when we come up with a puck. All that skill, all those mindsets, it all works so well.”
Playing within that cohesion constructed a situation to place Stavroff at the center of the national spotlight. His breakout season is a byproduct of a career that started with 22 points and quickly ascended through barriers historically preventing Ivy League teams from leading the college hockey chase. His four-goal outburst during a December game against Brown was the first Texas-sized hat trick since Hugh Jessiman scored four times against Yale in 2003, and following it with a second two-goal game against the Bulldogs completed a nine-point weekend that pushed the Big Green into their 10-0-0 start.
“Cam’s one of the best skaters that I’ve ever played with,” said Stavroff. “He’s one of the fastest guys, and he’s always getting out of the forecheck. If we’re in the zone, he can push a defense back and buy space for us. Then within that space, Hank and I have the ability to make plays with each other, through defenders, finding space, and every time we make a play, it’s a little bit more confidence that we can do something like that on a nightly basis.”
“He’s got a little bit of swagger to him,” said Cashman. “The competitiveness is at the baseline of any kid that we recruit because it has to be natural for them to compete. We just felt that (Stavroff) was very genuine. Every guy has some warts and strengths as a recruit, but when he pushed to compete, when he really decided that something was important, we felt it would really translate into his natural ability to shoot with his release [off the puck]. That was a kid that we felt, in our culture with like-minded kids, we were hopeful that Hayden would turn out the way that he has.”
Most of college hockey’s upper echelon never expected Dartmouth to sustain its success through the holiday season, but the unheralded Big Green remained eighth in the NPI after gaining a tie and win over ECAC’s North Country duo from New York. In the transfer portal era featuring more players with NHL draft pedigrees or Canadian Hockey League junior experience, an Ivy League program devoid of either headline-grabbing spotlight is a throwback that’s earning wins against the tide.
“(Players like) Hayden are 100 percent due to (assistant coach) Jason Tapp,” said Cashman. “We were in late March when we were done with admissions for the next fall, and as a program, we were trying to figure out which of the first year junior hockey guys were going to go back to juniors for a second year while balancing against which guys might be ready to pop. Once the season ended, we went to watch hockey, and Hayden had been a really interesting case. He’d had a really tough first half of the year where he hadn’t been playing a lot, and in the second half, he just took off.
“Jason did his deep dive on who was having a good second half, not just who was having a good year, but who was having a good second half,” he continued, “and Hayden jumped off the page. We have a good relationship with Kevin Patrick at Culver Academy, where he played prep school, so we made a call that checked a lot of boxes towards his competitiveness. Combined with his scoring, we really wanted to get him on campus.”
“When I visited, I was blown away,” Stavroff said. “It’s a great campus, and there’s a great culture within the school. It’s not a huge school, so the community is pretty close together. Then you add Coach Cashman as a coach, and I just fully trusted what he was doing to build this program into what it is right now. I wanted to be a part of that building process. I didn’t want to go to a top-5 team at that time. I wanted to be something bigger than that.”
“One thing about our program is that outcomes don’t determine our output,” he said. “We have the same mindset when we get to the rink because we want to get better every day and push each other constantly. That’s a big part of the growth within our team and a big part of why we’re starting to see some success.”