Ben Syer had been around the block a few times.
The first-year head coach possessed no prior experience as the leader behind the bench of a college hockey program – or at any other level, for that matter – but his 20-year journey through ECAC Hockey rinks made him uniquely qualified for Princeton’s forefront position when it opened during this summer’s offseason window.
Once an untested and untrained assistant for an Atlantic Hockey-level Quinnipiac team, he’d burnished a reputation as Rand Pecknold’s recruiting coordinator during the team’s conference switch to ECAC. A later 2011 switch to Cornell subsequently continued a profile elevation as one of NCAA Division I’s best defensive wizards, so despite the perceived lack of head coaching experience, the Tigers found themselves with a hiring coup when they brought him aboard for the 2024-2025 season.
He possessed the rare blend of experience under both ECAC and Ivy League umbrellas, and he understood Princeton’s place within the Ancient Eight’s six-pack of hockey programs. He’d finally won the Whitelaw Cup with the Big Red after Mike Schafer’s 14-year drought ended in 2024, and he’d helped solder the foundation for Quinnipiac’s dynastic explosion over the past decade. All that remained was an anticipated step forward and, for the Tigers, a potential return to the glory experienced during 2017’s magical run to the conference championship.
This past weekend, a pair of wins over No. 12 Ohio State might have just planted the first flags and first seeds of that success.
“They have a great team,” said Syer of the opponent swept out of Hobey Baker Rink. “Just looking at that program and what they’ve done over a number of years, our guys knew the entire weekend would be a battle that [required] us to compete from start to finish. That was something that was evident within our group because it was trying at times and we had some adversity that we had to face, but that part of competing, that determination, never wavered from our guys.”
Princeton already had Syer’s first head coaching win in its back pocket when the Buckeyes arrived in New Jersey for a two-game stint at the century-old barn located a short walk’s distance from the university’s venerated greenspace at Poe Field and Pardee Field, but the two wins encapsulated the growth occurring in the aftermath of the four-point road trip to Yale and Brown.
On both nights, a hard-charging road team with nine wins in its first eight weeks charged at the Tigers’ multi-goal lead with limited successful supply, and on both nights, the late-game heroics from the scarlet-and-gray visitors required the historic orange-and-black team to dig its heels into its own end.
On Friday night, an early 1-0 lead in the first period waited until the closing seconds of the second before opening into a two-goal lead, but a mid-period goal from Ohio State’s Joe Dunlap closed halved the gap before Jake Manfre’s second power play goal of the game caused the comeback’s house of cards to collapse on itself.
One night later, the inverse occurred when the Tigers found themselves nursing a 3-0 lead before a five-minute major, 10-minute misconduct and subsequent holding penalty – all assessed to the same player – began a stretch that saw Princeton kill off approximately 11:30 worth of penalty-riddled game time before the third period’s horn.
“To be quite honest, 15 minutes [of power play hockey] is something that I’m not sure I’ve ever been a part of,” Syer laughed. “I told our guys that we prepare for a lot of things, but you don’t really prepare to kill 11 of the final 15 minutes [of a game]. I give our guys a lot of credit because they battled hard right down to the end. It was an interesting third, but they handled the ebbs and flows as things went along.”
That’s more or less the theme now emerging through a stretch that’s seen Princeton’s first eight games operate under a flag of remarkable consistency. It hasn’t always produced wins, but even the outlier performances of a pair of five-goal defensive performances were decidedly off-set by the team’s performances in its three wins.
Offensively, averaging two goals per game is nearly equal to the 2.5 goals per game allowed, and shot totals are neatly balanced between 25 shots taken and 27 shots allowed on an average basis. Power plays are aligned with five goals scored against six allowed, but one empty net goal places Princeton’s over-advantage analytics at a clean 50-50 break while special teams, even with the 17 minutes assessed on one play in one game, is borderline equal with five more penalties taken than given.
Leading scorers are even harder to distinguish because the players atop the statistical scoring sheets aren’t necessarily scoring the biggest goals in any one game. Brendan Gorman still sits in the team’s top spot with three goals and three assists, but his goal from this past weekend’s Saturday game was his first strike since scoring twice in the opening three games. That said, his two assists in Friday’s game complemented Manfre’s scoring touch while David Ma and Noah de la Durantaye joined them as the team’s multi-goal scorers.
Six other players have at least one goal for a team that produced three 10-goal scorers last year, and both Arthur Smith and Ethan Pearson posted similar statistics in their near-even timeshare in net. They’ve each saved within range of one another with Pearson’s numbers skewing longer because of dueling 29-save performances against Harvard and Brown.
“You certainly know the type of student-athlete that’s here [at Princeton],” said Syer. “The commitment that’s required day-in and day-out to the complete student-athlete experience is something that was always very attractive, so getting to know these guys and their level of commitment [to this program] is something that’s been very, very attractive [to a coach].”
Yet nothing truly prepared the nation for the shock of watching Princeton score back-to-back victories over a mighty Big Ten powerhouse.
Maybe it was because last year’s schedule, albeit in a different era, opened with the Tigers inverting their results after sweeping Brown and Yale with a win over Cornell before losing both games at Ohio State, but the wins over the Buckeyes seemingly continued a conversation regarding the overall success of Ancient Eight programs within the ECAC power structure. They didn’t necessarily move Princeton up through the league’s standings, but the victories pushed the Tigers into the top half of college hockey despite a later start than literally every other team on the national landscape.
Along with Cornell and Dartmouth, the push to fill the void vacated by Quinnipiac’s .500 start landed the league two victories over a team currently situated along the national tournament bubble and centered another possible dark horse into a conversation that largely omitted it during last year.
“When you’re in something, it’s always going to be different than what you see as a perception,” said Syer. “Princeton isn’t vastly different from what I expected, but the day-in and day-out have probably changed it a little bit. Working at an Ivy League school for the past 13 years, you know there are different parameters that are in place, but having those understandings about the type of student-athlete that will have success, [finding what] motivates them is part of the differences [of different teams].”
Princeton returns to the ice this weekend when it hosts Union and Rensselaer in conference play before a three-week break into the holiday season. Three non-conference games then bookend the New Year’s Day holiday with a road trip to Army West Point preceding two home games against New Hampshire.
