What Recruiting Says About Schafer's Plans

I don't follow the recruiting scene as closely as others do, but it seems clear that Cornell has been doing quite well recently. I wrote earlier about Philippe Hudon, and it was reported over the weekend that Swedish player Joakim Ryan has committed to the Big Red.

Of course, top recruits do not necessarily lead to success. Just look at Harvard these past two years.

But perhaps the trend towards landing bigger recruits in Ithaca says something about the future of the Cornell hockey program.

One of the big, if unspoken, questions surrounding the Cornell hockey program is how much longer Mike Schafer will stay at Cornell. He's already won more games than any other coach in school history (having passed Dick Bertrand last year). I speculated in July that Schafer received a generous contract extension back in 2005 which persuaded him to stay at Cornell.

Cornell hired alum Casey Jones as an associate head coach before the start of last season. Jones had held the same job at Ohio State for over a decade, so this wasn't exactly a move upward. The Jones hiring led some fans to assume that Schafer would be leaving in the next two years, since Jones is a logical and qualified replacement.

So, what does the trend towards bringing in better recruits tell us about Schafer's intentions?

On the one hand, it may mean that he's serious about staying. He may have hired Casey Jones to bring in the top players needed to make a run at the NCAA championship. Schafer has a family and a pretty good gig at Cornell. Maybe the newly rekindled Cornell-BU rivalry has piqued Schafer's respect for Jack Parker, and he envisions a similar, incredibly long career for himself at Cornell. Jones will stay for a couple of years before moving on to a head coaching job somewhere else. Besides, it's not like Schafer will be offered an NHL head coaching job. He'd be getting a minor league coaching job, or maybe even an assistant's job somewhere in the NHL. Either way, he wouldn't have the high level of control he currently holds over the Cornell program.

The more logical explanation, at least to me, is that Schafer is leaving. If he wants to leave, it would make sense to do so at the end of this season. This is the most talented Cornell team since 2003, and with Scrivens, Greening, Gallagher, (likely) Riley Nash, etc., all leaving at the end of the year, it's not clear when Schafer can expect a similarly strong team. If he brings Cornell back to the Frozen Four and competes for the national title, that's a high note on which to end his career. If he makes the NCAA tournament but yet again fails to reach the Frozen Four, it might just be time for Schafer to move on.

Jones may have been brought back with the understanding that he would work as associate head coach for a couple of years, and then he would take over a team which is full of players he had personally recruited. Schafer is not old, but he's been getting injured a lot recently. (Rumor is that his red cast at RPI/Union was from his punching a wall post-BU game.) A job with an NHL team might not require him to spend so much time on skates. Schafer's defensive and goaltending success at Cornell give him the credentials to help an NHL team on that end of the ice.

Of course, this is just my own thinking. In any case, I can't see both Jones and Schafer staying together at Cornell for too many years. Either Schafer leaves and Jones takes over, or Jones becomes head coach somewhere else.

The big question of this past summer was whether Riley Nash and Colin Greening would stay for another year. The big question of this coming summer may be whether Mike Schafer stays for another year.