But making the jump was, at least initially, a bit more difficult than Mazzoleni had suggested.
“At first it was a huge difference,” Pelle said. “I’d be going to the net, and I’d just get knocked over. I’d be like, ‘Holy shit. What’d I get myself into?’”
That late-summer anxiety was short-lived, though. Hitting the weight room in earnest with the upperclassmen and skating in captain’s practice prior to the season’s start, Pelle worked himself into the shape he’d need to crash the net as he had throughout his career with the Apple Core.
By the end of pre-season, captain Noah Welch couldn’t help but mention that Pelle and several other freshmen were skating and banging bodies as though they’d been there all along.
“When I’m going up against a bigger guy, I feel like I’m 6’2 out there,” Pelle said. “I don’t picture myself, or think about myself like, ‘Oh, this guy is 10 times as strong or as big as me.’ I’m just going to go in there and compete against him like we were the same size. It’s not even something that really crosses my mind when I’m out there.”
And as his first season draws to a close, Pelle’s size isn’t crossing his opponents’ minds any more either. Nimble, quick, and certainly strong enough, the freshman may not bulldoze his way to the cage, but he finds his way to rebounds nonetheless, much to the chagrin of the defensemen who never saw him breaking for the far post. In his first eight games alone, Pelle totaled eight points, highlighted by his two tallies—both second-chance power-play goals—against No. 1 BC in the Crimson’s 3-1 upset victory on Nov. 16.
“Pelle’s not the prototypical small guy,” linemate Charlie Johnson said. “I think he’s scored all his goals within five feet of the net. He gets there, gets the rebounds. He doesn’t play on the outside. He’s got a knack for finding the open spots and he slips by the ‘D’ without letting them lean on him, because if they did he might be in trouble.”
One would certainly think so. But, as coaches past and present agree, Pelle—blessed with superior hockey sense—is far too crafty to take such a licking. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t be where he is today.
Even when opponents appeared to have him solved—Pelle was held to just two points in nine starts between Nov. 27 and Jan. 8—the rookie bounced back, rattling off 15 points in his 16 most recent appearances.
“I’ve probably had to rely on making the smart play every time because it’s hard for me to just physically beat a guy,” Pelle said. “So I’m going to have to use my head a little more to fake him out one way or the other and beat him with my mind rather than my body.”
Or, perhaps better still, with someone else’s body altogether. During his latest scoring flurry, Pelle has set up 12 of his teammates’ tallies, more than tripling his assist total in the process.
“He’s small, but it doesn’t seem to limit him too much,” assistant captain Tom Cavanagh said. “He makes the guys around him, I think, look a lot better because he does a lot of the little things really well.”
“I guess the cliché is, ‘He’s small but he plays big,’” Johnson added. “But that’s the way he is.”
And even if that’s not good enough to make him a big man on campus, he’s left no doubt as to his size one he steps onto the ice.
—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.