“For the one play he struggled with, he made 20 great plays,” Mazzoleni said. “Sometimes people forget the 20 or 30 things he does right every night.”

Thoughts Best Left to Summer

But some people are paying attention, including the scouts who come to see him play on many nights during the season.

Welch, like many of his teammates, has been taken in the NHL Draft. Drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in the second round of the 2001 Draft, he represents the highest pick (54th overall) on the Harvard roster.

And Welch’s play through two seasons has impressed the people who hope to one day be his employers.

“Obviously he was a very high draft choice, and we’re very happy to have him in the organization,” said the late Herb Brooks, former Pittsburgh Penguins’ Director of Player Development and coach of the 1980 Gold-Medal winning ‘Miracle on Ice’ team. “He has the size, the skating ability, the decision making.”

Welch has come to realize that he possesses many of the skills needed for the NHL.

“It’s great when you see guys that you’ve skated with like Dom Moore ’03 playing up in the Show and doing well,” he said. “In a way I’m real close, but in another way I’m so far.”

A part of that distance from the NHL is personally enforced; fantasies about skating in the same sweater as the Lemieuxs and the Jagrs of the world are a diversion best reserved for the summer, otherwise it would be too distracting.

“The prospect of playing in the pros does have an effect on you,” Welch admitted. “I made a promise to myself not to think about it because that leads to you putting yourself before the team.

Learning From Experience

Putting himself before the team is certainly not something Welch wants to do. He mentioned his benching preemptively, listing it along with the Beanpot and Cornell as one of the things that have humbled him.

And perhaps it’s a good thing that occasionally—maybe once a season—Welch is humbled on the ice. It would be far too easy to get a swelled head as a result of all the adjectives and exclamations that are generally directed his way, however justified they are.

“He is a premier defenseman at the Division I level, and an offensive catalyst for our team,” Mazzoleni said. “He’s going to be someone who can dominate at both ends of the rink. He hasn’t touched all of his abilities yet. He’s a difference maker.”

Welch has made his mistakes—but more importantly, he’s turned them into a learning experience. And Harvard hockey is better for it.

“If there’s 60 teams in college hockey, there’s 59 other ones that’d love to have Noah Welch on their team,” Mazzoleni said. “We’re very fortunate to have him here.”

—Staff writer Timothy M. McDonald can be reached at tmcdonal@fas.harvard.edu.