Brains on ice
Thanks to effective recruiting (and a built-in fallback plan), Harvard is becoming a professional-hockey prep school — in spite of Ivy League rules.
Boston Globe
By Nathaniel Popper | October 11, 2009
Louis Leblanc became a celebrity this past summer. In June, the wiry 18-year-old was the first draft pick of his hometown team, the Montreal Canadiens, a franchise with no rival in the hockey-mad province of Quebec. All of a sudden, the soft-spoken son of a chemist was an object of obsession for newspapers and fans.
“It’s pretty crazy. You’re in a restaurant, and people want pictures and autographs,” Leblanc said late in the summer.
In August, Leblanc moved south to attend Harvard, where he’s living in a freshman dorm, studying, and playing his first season with the college hockey team (the Canadiens can wait). Leblanc intends to major in economics and has enrolled in the freshman survey course with professor Gregory Mankiw, onetime chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. When I met with Leblanc during his first week at school, he was wearing mesh shorts and a Team Canada T-shirt and was coming from a class on gender and performance. “It’s a class on how people react and perform, I guess,” he said. “A lot of athletes take it.”
Leblanc has wanted to be a professional hockey player for as long as he can remember. But after he was drafted by the National Hockey League, he didn’t listen to the scouts who wanted him to skip college and dedicate himself to the pro game.
“It’s a business for them, and the minute you’re not good anymore, they don’t talk to you, right? So I’m doing what’s best for me. If I play hockey — that’s obviously my main goal, to play hockey in the NHL — if that happens, then great,” Leblanc says. “If I don’t, then I’ll have a Harvard degree.”
Harvard is known for turning out superstars in many fields, but because it doesn’t offer athletic scholarships and follows stringent Ivy League rules regulating players’ academic lives, professional athletes are not the typical Harvard product. Yes, there is the occasional James Blake, the highly ranked tennis player, and the football team has had a few recent success stories, but most athletes at the school have no professional aspirations.
Leblanc’s sport, though, is a fascinating anomaly. The Harvard hockey team has remained a regular training ground for the professional ranks, and 79 Harvard players have been drafted by NHL teams since the league was founded in 1917 — more professional draft picks than any Ivy League team in any sport. Unlike pro football or basketball, drafted players don’t have to immediately join their pro teams, so players can arrive on campus already drafted or sign while they’re in college.
The Harvard hockey team’s most triumphant moment came in 1989, when it won the National Collegiate Athletic Association Championship, beating the University of Minnesota. Since then, the team has not done as well in the rankings. Despite this, the rate of players going to the pros from Harvard has actually increased.
A few weeks before Leblanc was drafted this summer, Craig Adams, 32, played a vital role in helping the Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup. Back in 1999, when I was a freshman punching bag on the Harvard junior varsity hockey team, Adams was the hard-hitting history major and captain of the varsity team. A decade later, I watched Adams on my television screen, lifting the Stanley Cup alongside a bunch of millionaire NHL superstars, many of whom had never taken a college course in their lives.
Adams and Leblanc gave up a lot to play hockey in Cambridge. At a college hockey powerhouse like Minnesota or Boston College or Boston University, they would have had athletic scholarships and star status on campus. Leblanc, by contrast, spent his freshman orientation adjusting to anonymity.
“It’s not like walking around Montreal,” Leblanc says, “but, you know, Harvard is a little different. It’s one of the best schools in the world, and hockey — it’s not their main focus.”
Leblanc’s effort to thrive athletically and academically in this unusual atmosphere is part of an ongoing experiment of sorts, one testing whether one of the best universities in the world can continue to turn out players at the very highest professional level. It is an experiment that involves challenges and occasional glories that even I did not fully understand when I was in the middle of it on campus.