In Year 4, Reid Cashman Has Dartmouth Back on the Map
by Cameron Levasseur/CHN Reporter
HANOVER, N.H. Molly’s Restaurant on Main Street is packed.
There’s a group of college kids in one corner, planning their next move on a Friday night. A crowd of locals sit at the bar, winding down from a long work week. And spread throughout the restaurant, dotting every other table, are members of the Dartmouth men’s hockey team, which an hour earlier and a mile away, pulled off its biggest — almost — win in a handful of years.
Goaltender Cooper Black ducks through the entryway, his 6-foot, 8-inch frame turning heads as he walks in. He made 38 saves in the Big Green’s 2-2 tie with reigning national champion Quinnipiac that night, plus a couple more to earn the extra point in the shootout.
The vibes are high — the highest they’ve been in a long time — and the Big Green have yet to win a game.
“That weekend — Quinnipiac-Princeton — was huge,” sophomore Luke Haymes said. “Just kind of cementing our identity as a team and telling ourselves, ‘We’ve got a hell of a team here and we can do this,’ so that was a good confidence boost for the program.”
Dartmouth earned its first win over Princeton the next night and added 10 more in the four months since, one shy of its total from the last two seasons combined.
But the most eye-catching number on its record is not the wins. It’s the ties. Nine to be exact. Two short of both the NCAA and ECAC record of 11, set by Harvard in 2011-12.
It started in the first game of the season, skating to a 1-1 draw with the then-nationally ranked Crimson. The next weekend was the 2-2 tie with Quinnipiac. Seven days later they matched that score at Cornell. Then followed a three-game streak of scoreboard stalemates at Clarkson and Arizona State, a pair of late January, early February deadlocks and most recently, a four-all draw against St. Lawrence.
“It’s not like we’ve ever talked about, ‘Oh, if we could just tie tonight, that would be great,’” fourth-year head coach Reid Cashman said. “We’re obviously trying to win, but if you take a step back, we lost 24 games last year, and so those losses last year have turned to ties or turned to wins this year, so there has been a massive…
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