Cornell Notes is The Sun’s weekly notebook about the Cornell men’s and women’s hockey teams. It is produced by The Cornell Daily Sun hockey beat.
For opponents of women’s hockey in the past two seasons, wins at Lynah Rink have been hard to come by. Dating back to the 2023-2024 campaign, Cornell has amassed a 32-5-1 record at home. During this stretch, only one team has a winning record in Ithaca: Colgate.
Since the pandemic, the Raiders have acted as a foil for the Red’s ECAC and NCAA title dreams. In the past four years, Cornell has had its season ended twice by the Raiders, including in 2024 when Colgate beat the Red in both postseason tournaments.
Last March was a different story. After Cornell split its annual home-and-home weekend series with the Raiders (picking up the Red’s first road win over Colgate since 2020), the two central New York rivals met in the ECAC championship game — which Cornell won.
“Obviously, that’s something that’s always there, that little rivalry between us and Colgate,” said then-sophomore goaltender Annelies Bergmann after the Red’s 5-1 victory. “To be able to come out on the other side of this today is just an amazing feeling.”
For the first time since that ECAC championship win, No. 4 Cornell (7-0-0, 4-0-0 ECAC) will face off against No. 14 Colgate (5-6-1, 1-2-2 ECAC) this weekend. The teams will play on Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. in Hamilton, before facing off at Lynah Rink on Saturday, 24 hours later.
Early Season History
Women’s hockey is off to one of its best starts in program history, winning the first seven of its games in convincing fashion. The Red have four shutouts, a 30-5 goal differential, and two wins over ranked opponents.
Before last week, Cornell had never won its first seven games in a season. In 2023, the team went undefeated in its first 11 games, but tied Mercyhurst in the second week of the season. The legendary 2019-2020 squad won its first five games before tying Clarkson. That team had a nine-game undefeated streak to begin the year, but went undefeated at Lynah Rink until an ECAC championship game loss.
Until Cornell’s win over Brown on Nov. 1, the all-time program record winning streak to start the season came in the 1977-1978 campaign. That team outscored opponents 81-8 in its six season-opening victories, before losing 13-2 to McMaster University.
Interestingly, Cornell’s four shutouts through seven games this year only ties a program record. The 2019-2020 team opened the season with Lindsay Browning ’21 M.Eng. ’22 notching three straight shutouts in net, before earning her fourth in the team’s seventh game.
The previous shutout record through seven games was set in Cornell’s third season. The 1974-1975 team tallied three shutouts in a row — a pair against Oswego State and one against Ithaca College — after starting the season with a 10-2 drubbing of Colgate.
Bergmann’s Shutout Streak
12:18 into the third period on a Saturday afternoon, Brown’s Sam Broze fired a one-time shot into the back of the net to cut Cornell’s lead to three. The goal didn’t affect the game’s outcome (Cornell won 5-1), but it ended one of the greatest goaltending streaks in program history. Before Broze’s score, it had been exactly 250 minutes since Bergmann had last allowed a goal. The reigning ECAC Goaltender of the Year’s shutout streak started in the third period of a 5-2 win over Harvard, going on to span shutout wins over Dartmouth, Syracuse and Yale. During her four-plus hours of perfect play, Bergmann fended off 103 shots and picked up her 16th, 17th and 18th career shutouts.
How great has Bergmann been? Not only did the Detroit native win the first ECAC Goalie of the Month Award, but her shutout streak was the longest by a Cornell netminder since at least 1996. A lack of box scores before the start of the NCAA era in 2001 makes it difficult to confirm, but Bergmann’s streak is likely the longest consecutive shutout streak by a Cornell goaltender in program history.
“I do think the team as a whole is taking pride in their defensive play,” said head coach Doug Derraugh '91. “But obviously to go that long without a goal against, the goaltender has to make some big saves. And she has.”
The shutout streak is the longest for a Cornell team since 2010, when Amanda Mazzotta ’12 and Lauren Slebodnick ’14 combined for four straight shutouts and 282 consecutive minutes of perfect defensive play.
Scouting the Raiders
While Cornell has had a hot start to the season, the Red’s travel partner has struggled. After nearly making the Frozen Four a year ago, Colgate started this season ranked No. 5 in the nation, but has fallen to No. 14. The Raiders already have multiple bad losses this season, including the program’s first loss to Dartmouth since 2015 and a blown three-goal lead against Yale. Head coach Stefan Decosse’s squad is coming off a 3-0 loss to the Rochester Institute of Technology, who finished fourth in Atlantic Hockey America a season ago.
Decosse, who replaced current New York Sirens head coach Greg Fargo at the start of last season, has had to contend with the loss of both his 2024-2025 leading goal-scorer and starting netminder to the PWHL. While Emma Pais and Elyssa Biederman have kept the Raiders offense close to its 3.6 goals per game clip from last season (the Raiders currently average 3.3), the loss of goaltender Hannah Murphy largely explains how opponents' goals per game have ballooned from 1.9 to 3.3.
Still, the talent pool in Hamilton is high enough that a Colgate turnaround seems likely.
“I think they’re on the path to being a really good team,” Derraugh said. “They’ve gone through some growing pains and some adjustments early on. I think they’re going to get better and better as the year progresses, because I think they do have a lot of firepower.
It Doesn’t Get More Special
So far this season, Cornell’s special teams have not just been great — they’ve been the best in the nation. The Red’s penalty kill has started the season with a perfect 17 for 17 record, and the power play unit has scored 10 goals in 25 opportunities.
For Derraugh, the success of the penalty kill unit comes down to both team-wide buy-in and Bergmann’s brilliance.
“It starts with your goaltender, and our goaltender has been big in those situations,” Derraugh said. “Our women have committed to the defensive side of the game, and they take a lot of pride in their penalty killing. We have some veteran penalty killers who love to penalty kill and it shows.”
On the offensive end, Cornell’s power play has accounted for 30 percent of the team’s goals. While the unit’s 40 percent conversion clip is impressive, the comparative lack of five-on-five offensive is worrying.
“Quite honestly, we would like to see more offense five-on-five,” Derraugh said. “We’ve relied, I think, too much on the power play so far.”
International Updates
Three Cornell alumnae participated in this weekend’s Rivalry Series games between the United States and Canada. For Canada, Micah Zandee-Hart ’20 — who recently signed an extension with the New York Sirens — was bumped up from the fourth defensive pairing to the first after game one. Kristin O'Neill ’20 also wore the maple leaf sweater over the weekend, serving as an extra skater on Thursday and a fourth-line center on Saturday.
While Zandee-Hart may have secured her spot on the Olympic roster as one of the few Canadian bright spots in the two games, O'Neill’s Olympic roster spot is less secure.
Meanwhile, Rory Guilday ’25 — the Sun’s 2024-2025 Female Senior Athlete of the Year — suited up for the U.S. and served as a fourth-pairing defender alongside Ohio State’s Emma Peschel, who defeated Guilday and Cornell in last spring’s Frozen Four. The United States swept the first two games of the four-game series, 4-1 and 6-1.
Brianne Jenner ’15, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and recent Cornell Hall of Fame inductee, did not make Canada’s Rivalry series roster. This likely means she will not get the chance to play in her fourth Olympics.
The rivalry series will resume on Dec. 10 in Edmonton, Alberta, with action available in the United States on NHL Network.
Eli Fastiff is a senior editor on the 143rd editorial board and a member of the class of 2026 in the College of Arts and Sciences. You can follow him on X @Eli_Fastiff and reach him at efastiff@cornellsun.com.
