Rejuvenated Princeton Symbolizes Return to Form For Many Historic Programs Post-Pandemic
by Jane McNally/CHN Reporter
Ben Syer still gets emotional just thinking about it.
It’s March 10, 2020. He is sitting in an office at Lynah Rink, in the midst of his eighth season as the associate head coach at Cornell.
It’s a Tuesday. He has just caught wind that Harvard is not practicing.
“‘Who is not practicing?’” Syer recalls asking his fellow coaching staff. “‘Who is not practicing on a Tuesday right now?’”
Within a mere few days, things were crumbling. Players whispered about how a Michigan Tech bus got turned around midway through its drive to Minnesota State. Fans were told to stay home before games were cancelled altogether due to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic.
Cornell, sitting third in the Pairwise at the time and almost a shoo-in for one of the top seeds in the NCAA Tournament, would soon send its players home for the foreseeable future.
Of course, that future did not turn out to be the end of that season, nor the next. Syer recalls watching other NCAA teams return to play in 2020-21 while his players lamented the loss of what was supposed to be a hardware-earning season — and then another one on top of that.
The coaches could not dwell on it for too long, though.
“At the time, when you’re living it, and you see other teams playing, you feel like you’re falling behind,” Syer said. “So, how is it that you’re trying to keep up?”
Recruit, recruit, recruit. Practice as best you can, and recruit some more.
Six years later, things look different for Syer. He left Cornell in 2024 for the head coaching job at Princeton. After a disappointing first season at the helm, 2025-26 has seen the Tigers reach new heights — Princeton’s 11 wins (and counting) are the most since 2010-11, and the Tigers have snuck in as high as top-15 in the NPI.
A lot of that can be attributed to Syer’s mindset — seeing the pandemic and its afflictions on the Ivy League not as something that set the teams back, but as something that allowed them to reset.
“It’s funny people say that. In the same token, it did set it back, but it also gave you a reset that maybe other places didn’t. I looked at it almost like a sabbatical,” Syer said. “I had an opportunity to do more Zooms and different talks with different people that I wouldn’t have met, and it really changed how I looked at teaching and coaching and developing.
“I really felt that that was a unique opportunity to be able to learn and maybe step back where you weren’t as focused on wins and losses on Friday and Saturday night.”
This year, the Tigers are in the mix to contend for an Ivy League title, trailing Dartmouth and Cornell, both of which have also strung together impressive campaigns.
Cornell is in the driver’s seat for said title after losing out on a repeat last year to Dartmouth. It is hard not to mention the Big Red in conversations about the pandemic’s repercussions — after all, Cornell was the top-ranked team in the country before it had the carpet swept from beneath it.
“COVID set [the Ivy League] back a little bit. It just lost a little bit of its momentum,” said Cornell head coach Casey Jones. Jones was at Clarkson when the pandemic hit, but is now tasked with rerailing a Cornell team back on the track where it once rode.
“We’re far enough removed now. [The] coaches have done a good job of getting a roster set and getting it back to ground zero here, where they’re layering class after class and getting the identity they want to play with.”
No matter how you see it, there is no doubting that the Ivy League has gone through a resurgence this season — four of the six squads are above .500. To put it in perspective, the Ivy hasn’t seen more than two of its teams achieve winning records in a single season since 2018-19 (three), and four Ivies haven’t had been above .500 in one campaign since 2015-16.
Is the Ivy League back to where it was before the pandemic? Well, sort of, says Jones.
“I don’t think it’s just returned to form,” Jones said. “I think it’s taken another step from where it was.”
Maybe multiple steps — last year, Dartmouth won its first Ivy League title in nearly two decades. It was also the first Ivy crown earned by a team other than Cornell or Harvard since 2015.
Of course, the fact that the age of the COVID fifth-year — or even sixth-year — is over. For Dartmouth head coach Reid Cashman, getting back to an even playing field — as even as it can be in the new age of NIL and the transfer portal — was the start of the revitalization of the Ancient Eight.
“[That] was really tough on the Ivies,” Cashman told Elite Prospects in January. “Because we were playing against teams that were able to go out and get somebody with a ton of experience — multiple guys with that — and did not have that fifth year available. I think that [fifth-year players being out of college hockey] helped us.”
Of course, for others, this new era hasn’t been welcomed quite as smoothly. Brown, having not topped the Ivy League in nearly 22 years, is just 4-16-0 this year and just recently saw longtime head coach Brendan Whittet step away from the program to attend to a family medical matter. When he returns from his leave, which begins on Feb. 20, he will assume a new position in the Brown athletic department.
Whittet’s program, unlike some of the other now-flourishing Ivies, experienced a turbulent offseason — Brown lost last season’s leading goalscorer, Max Scott, and its starting goaltender, Lawton Zacher, to the transfer portal. Other subtractions either graduated or signed professional contracts.
“I think it’s a consequence of being able to transfer anywhere you want with no repercussions,” Whittet said in November. “It’s constantly in my mind. At least with us, it seems like we have a lot of new players as a result of the transfer portal and no repercussions.”
Princeton, on the other hand, did not lose any of its eligible players to the transfer portal. What Syer has noticed is a certain mentality with his group — one perhaps passed down from the elder Tiger players that endured the heartbreak of the pandemic.
“I wasn’t [at Princeton] at the time, but what they went through and the commitment that they made to continue to develop as players, I think that attitude and that mentality has filtered down to those that are underneath them,” Syer said.
Princeton has not finished with a winning record since that 2010-2011 season, and is looking for its first trip to Lake Placid for the ECAC Championship since it won it all in 2018.
Talk of the pandemic has largely eroded, and rightfully so — it’s been over half a decade since it ravaged the hockey world. But Princeton, aided by young talent in Kai Daniells and Jake Manfre, feels the effects of that year-long stoppage — in a good way.
“I think it’s maybe not teaching them how to score goals or play a particular system,” Syer said, “but really showing that the mentality and the work ethic in the culture is so important when you’re building a team, [one that] can endure a lot of hardships.”
And now that the momentum has started, it shows few signs of stopping. The ability to now recruit from the Canadian Hockey League has changed the way all teams build their rosters, including Ivy League squads. And although Syer or Jones any other Ivy League coach can’t offer a paycheck to lure a blue-chip prospect like other institutions can, the sheer amount of talent at their disposal can only make the Ancient Eight stronger.
“Everyone said, ‘well, certain teams are going to get the best players.’ Well, they always did get the best players,” Jones said. “It just gives everybody else more good players, it’s not hard to think that. I think now, any given night, anybody can beat anybody. That’s what our fans should want. That’s what everybody should want.”
“I think sometimes we get viewed as just an academic league, and we’re not,” Syer said. “It’s a group of student athletes that are driven, they have an extreme passion to get better at the game, and they happen to care about school.
“And I think it’s fantastic to be able to see that combination on the national level, [to] be able to make a little bit of noise. It’s awesome for the league — I don’t know if there’s a better way to put it. It’s great to see, because I think it really embodies what the student-athlete is.”
