Op-Ed
Let's Go Red!
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Archive This!
Archive This!
This weekend the Cornell men’s ice hockey team will take on ECAC rivals Princeton and Quinnipiac, and over 4,000 hockey fans will pour into Lynah Rink to watch the icers play their first regular season home games.
Cornell brought home its first intercollegiate championship after remaining undefeated during the 1910-1911 season. Today, Cornell has won a record 11 ECAC championships, 19 Ivy League titles (15 times outright and four times shared) and two NCAA championships. And former icer Ken Dryden ’69 makes Cornell proud as a Hockey Hall of Fame inductee.
Intercollegiate hockey began in 1896, though Cornell did not play its first game until 1901. Right from the start, the team began its tradition of winning — the icers were victorious in all three games they played that year. For the first few seasons, the Cornell team was forced to play all their games away because they didn’t have a proper rink. In 1906, the team was finally able to play its first home game — on Beebe Lake!
Cornell continued to play and practice on Beebe Lake until Lynah Rink opened in 1957, though there were a few years where Cornell did not play at all. Dave Cutting ’48 remembers the rink on Beebe as “primitive,” especially compared to facilities at wealthier schools. Legend has it that in Cornell hockey’s early days, if a student was willing to shovel snow off the lake, he could play on the team.
As other schools began to build indoor facilities, Cornell’s program suffered from a lack of practice time and forced game cancellations due to melting ice and unpredictable weather. Some years, entire seasons were cancelled. Cornell alum Walter Carpenter ’1910 (think Carpenter Library on the Engineering Quad) made a very welcome donation to build the hockey rink in the mid-1950s, and the rink opened in March 1957. One month later, the rink was officially named James D. Lynah Skating Hall to honor a former Cornell director of athletics.
The Cornell hockey team did not immediately make a comeback on Lynah’s new ice, as they slogged through a number of losing seasons after the rink’s doors opened. However, by the end of his career in 1963, Coach Paul Patten had created a respectable hockey team and handed the reigns over to Ned Harkness. Coach Harkness continued to transform the icers into a powerhouse, leading them to two NCAA championship titles during his 1963 to 1970 tenure as head coach.
In addition to having great coaches and players, Cornell hockey also has great fans. In North Carolina, my home state, people live and breathe ACC basketball. I quickly learned how important a team’s fans are to its identity. Growing up, my dad would tell tales of the Cameron Crazies at his alma mater while my mom, perhaps hoping for a lower tuition bill, tried to persuade me to attend UNC by taking the family to games in the Dean Dome. Upon arriving at Cornell my freshman year, I discovered Big Red fans can get pretty rowdy too; they just happen to do it at the hockey rink instead of the basketball arena. I was determined to find this “line of faithful” I had heard so much about to get season tickets. Eventually, I figured out that there was no line of faithful, but rather a group of students dubbed the Lynah Faithful (who sometimes stand/sleep in line). Either way, I was set on being a hockey fan.
Cornell hockey has had a loyal fan base throughout its history. Early fans — shall we call them the “Beebe Faithful?”— stood around the boards of the rink to watch Cornell battle their opponents on the lake. If the fans were feeling chilly, they had the option of warming up with a five cent cup of joe from the Johnny Parson’s Club, named for the engineering professor who helped raise money to build Cornell’s first rink.
Though Cornellians have always cheered their hockey team on, it was not until the 1961-1962 season that fans got really excited. The “Lynah Faithful” was born one February evening as fans lined up outside of the rink before the 1962 Cornell-Harvard game, filling the rink over capacity and storming the ice after Cornell clinched a close 2-1 win over the Crimson. In the seasons since this big win, students have gone through some variation of the hockey line to earn their tickets. Upperclassmen will recall the 2005 rush to get tickets that resulted in the “Lynah stampede,” perhaps the most aggressive charge for season tickets in recent history.
Throughout the years, loyal hockey fans have created a number of traditions at Lynah Rink. Throwing dead fish at Harvard as they skate onto the ice is possibly the most famous, and definitely the smelliest, of these traditions. In his book on Cornell hockey, Adam Wodon writes that “years ago” Harvard fans tied a live chicken to Cornell’s goal, teasing the team for being part of a university with an agriculture school. The Lynah Faithful did the same to Harvard’s goal during later meetings of the rival teams; however, after too many chickens died during this ritual, the Faithful began to chuck dead fish onto the ice, taunting the Crimson for their home near Boston Harbor.
The cow bell is another long-standing Lynah tradition started by Neil Cohen ’72 during his freshman year at Cornell. If you go to a game today, you’ll hear one lucky member of the Faithful pounding out the same rhythm Cohen played and prompting the “fight!” response from the rest of the boisterous crowd.
Lynah fans have also added more high-tech traditions to those of bygone days. Come game day, many Cornellians log onto Facebook to “poke” our opponent’s goalie. Old traditions or new, it’s easy to see why former player Matt Moulson ’06 told ESPN that the crowd at Lynah is the best one to play in front of in the entire nation — though he might be a little biased.
So to the freshmen who may be attending a Cornell hockey game for the first time this weekend, check out Senior Sports Editor Mike Mix’s column in yesterday’s paper about the dos and don’ts of Lynah fandom. And to everyone who has tickets: Let’s go, Red!
Sarah Olesiuk is a senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be contacted at solesiuk@cornellsun.com. Archive This! appears alternate Fridays.