Many have tried, but few have been able to define just what exactly Harvard hockey represents, encompasses, and signifies. The phrase is tossed around and dropped by members of the program anytime you talk to them, but when asked to describe it in words, few even know where to begin.

As seniors Ashley Banfield and Nicole Corriero made a valiant attempt to capture the meaning, I realized I had found it—not in their description, but in their own personal hockey chronicle. Theirs is a story that can be summed in one simple sentence: this is Harvard women’s hockey.

THE START OF SOMETHING BIG

First impressions aren’t everything. Though they were soon to become the best of friends, Corriero was not immediately receptive to the idea upon seeing Banfield for the first time.

The two were nine years old when Corriero came to her first tryout practice with the Scarborough Sharks, a local Canadian pee-wee team for girls.

“I show up and the coach is like, ‘Hey Bam-Bam, why don’t you demonstrate this drill.’ And this girl with the ugliest helmet I’ve ever seen demonstrates the drill,” Corriero recalls. “I said, ‘Ugh, look at that helmet. Who is that?’ totally just in a snobby, kind of superficial way. I was like I don’t want to work with her.”

“I had this giant visor and I wore it for one day, one practice, and she always talks about it,” Banfield says with a sigh.

While the two didn’t attend school together, they lived some five minutes away from each another in their native Ontario and saw each other often, playing hockey in the Corriero basement that had been furnished for hockey. Designed by Nicholas Corriero, Nicole’s father, the plywood-covered room boasts a shooting range, a net, and a wooden goalie—a prerequisite to their future power plays with Harvard.

Back on the ice, Banfield and Corriero played forward alongside Dartmouth junior Cherie Piper with the Sharks. Donning blue uniforms, the trio had a distinctive look about them.

“Piper’s dad started calling us Smurf because our team was blue, we were all three years younger than the other girls on the team, and we were also just short for our age,” Banfield says. “So we were disproportionately shorter than everyone else in the league.”

But what the trio lacked in size they made up for in skill, leading the Sharks to a provincial title in their first year together.

“Basically, the strategy was on a breakout, get the puck to Piper, and follow her down the ice,” Banfield says. “If she scored, you got the assist. If they took her out of the play, you were wide open and you could score.”

AN OFFER THEY COULDN’T REFUSE

Banfield squared off against Corriero on opposing Team Ontario squads in the 2001 National Championships. Corriero’s team prevailed, but Banfield proved herself a capable defensemen in front of college scouts while playing as a “force-fence,” a hybrid between defense and offense, throughout the game.

“That was the first time anyone from Harvard had seen me play, so they saw me as a forward but recruited me as a defenseman,” Banfield says.