When the volunteer first started working with Grumet-Morris, two things were apparent: the young goaltender had tremendous potential, but he was making life between the pipes a lot harder than it had to be.

“He would make a very acrobatic save,” Irving says, “but that was the first one, and he had no chance at making the second one. His stance and his ability to recover [were] very suspect.”

One who heard these criticisms without ever watching the Crimson might have thought Grumet-Morris to be a complete flop in net. But in fact, that was never the case.

In his first three years, the goaltender accumulated a 2.49 goals against average (GAA) and a .914 save percentage, both second in the Harvard history books. Grumet-Morris backstopped three phenomenal playoff runs, propelling the Crimson to three straight NCAA tournament appearances.

But these successes came in spite of Grumet-Morris’ weaknesses. Captain Noah Welch describes some of his classmate’s rookie efforts as “crazy, on-his-back, flipping-over-and-stopping-the-puck-with-the-back-of-his-head saves.”

Grumet-Morris made the saves, all right—he just made them look hard.

A FAST STUDY

Irving is quick to point out that there are scores of coaches with the right advice, but there are not always skaters who will take the pains to listen.

“Dov did,” Irving says. “He identified [his flaws] in bullet format and tried to pick them off, one by one.”

For his part, Grumet-Morris maintains that his game has best been served by two things: Bruce Irving and time.

“Goaltenders are not finished products when they come in [to college],” Grumet-Morris says of the latter factor, explaining, “it’s very easy for a young freshman forward to play on a team’s third line against the other team’s third-best line, play a power play, get some extra points, and start to put up good numbers, and start to play with other good, talented players.

“Whereas a goaltender,” he continues, “is either in the net playing well, or in the net playing poorly—in which case he’s usually on the bench after that.”

Grumet-Morris has played 113 to date, plenty of time to tweak his game with Irving’s insights.

“[Irving] has done such a fantastic job,” Grumet-Morris says, “because he relates what it is he’s thinking and his ideas about goaltending, his philosophies on goaltending so well. What he has been able to concentrate on is making the goaltenders at our program more simple in their approaches to the game, and to make the easy saves look easy.

“That’s something I had problems with my freshman year,” he admits, “and it ended up creating more trouble than a shot really should.”