Editor's note: The following story was originally written by Georgia Maloney '07 and printed in the Nov. 10 and 11, 2006, Cornell Hockey game program. It is reprinted in its entirety below.
He has been inducted into five different halls of fame. He has coached successful teams at both the collegiate and professional levels. He has the highest win percentage of any coach in college hockey history. He is the only coach to lead a college hockey team to an undefeated season. He is Ned Harkness. This is only the beginning of what Harkness has accomplished in his long career, and yet he is still extremely modest. Among other things, he is responsible for making Cornell hockey what it is today, but gives credit to everyone and everything but himself. However modest and humble he may be, the facts, figures and records speak for themselves and prove that Ned Harkness is an incredible man.
After coaching at RPI for 18 years, Harkness came to Ithaca in 1963 and took the helm of a Cornell hockey program that had been struggling. For Harkness, making the decision to come to Cornell was a no-brainer. He turned down offers from Yale, Colgate and several other schools when Cornell's athletic director, Bob Kane, asked Harkness to come coach the Big Red. When asked why he came to Cornell, Harkness said, “The one place I would have liked to be was at Cornell, and I got the opportunity, and I enjoyed it.”
When he arrived on the East Hill, Harkness immediately got to work on improving all aspects of the Cornell hockey program. Having already led the RPI hockey team to a national championship, Harkness knew what it took to achieve greatness. At practice he worked with the players extensively to create a team that people would want to watch. When he wasn't at practice, he took it upon himself to make sure that there would be people in the stands to watch his team.
“When I came here, they were lucky if they got four or five-hundred people at the hockey games here, if they got that,” Harkness said. “I told Mr. Kane it won't be long before you'll have to watch the obituary columns to get in this building, and it wasn't long either because we sold the place right out.”
Not only did Harkness drum up support from the student population, but he went into the Ithaca community as well, visiting every club and community organization that would let him in the door. This is why the crowd at Lynah today is made up of half students and half “townies.”
From the time that Lynah was built to the time that Harkness took over in 1963, the team had only one winning season. Harkness led his first Big Red team to a 12-10-1 season and continued to improve every year. In 1967 Cornell won its first NCAA championship and finished the season with a record of 27-1-1. Many people probably view that accomplishment as perfection, but in fact it's not, not quite. After the team finished third in the nation in 1968 and second in 1969, true perfection came in 1970.
After the 1969 season, the Big Red lost several key players, including four All-Americans, one of whom was Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden. Those losses prompted experts in the college hockey world to say that the 1969-70 season would be a rebuilding year for the Big Red. The team proved everyone wrong and finished that season a perfect 29-0-0, a feat that has yet to - and likely never will - be repeated in college hockey.
However unsupportive the critics may have been, Harkness and his team paid no attention. Harkness told his players never to think about the “other guys,” but to just worry about themselves and that would be enough.
“We believed that losing was tough on our shoulders, and we weren't going to lose,” he said. “We liked each other, and we had a lot of confidence. We played each game as it came, and we made it so that Lynah Rink was where angels feared to tread. That's what I told them, this will be where angels fear to tread, and they did.”
In 1965 tragedy struck the Cornell athletic family when two Big Red assistant lacrosse coaches were killed when their plane crashed on their way home from a recruiting trip. Harkness, who had also coached lacrosse at RPI, was called upon to assist head lacrosse coach Bob Cullen. The next year, Cullen stepped down, and at the players' request, Harkness was made the new head coach of Big Red lacrosse.
From 1966-1968 Harkness devoted all of his time to coaching two varsity sports, while also serving as the manager of Lynah Rink. In the three years that Harkness coached lacrosse at Cornell, his team lost only one game out of the 36 that they played. At that time there was not yet a NCAA tournament for lacrosse, but it was created shortly after Harkness left Cornell. After the 1968 season Harkness felt that juggling two sports was too much, so he stepped down as head lacrosse coach and focused solely on hockey.
After seeing his second national championship banner raised to the rafters of Lynah, Harkness said goodbye to Cornell and moved to Detroit, Mich., to coach the Detroit Red Wings. This transition made him the first coach to make the jump from college to professional hockey. Upon leaving Detroit, Harkness returned to New York to coach the Union College hockey team for a brief time before he became President of the Olympic Regional Development Authority at Lake Placid. Harkness then retired from that position in 1993 in order to spend more time with his family.
Ned Harkness has accomplished more in his lifetime than few could ever dream of. It is safe to say that some of his achievements will never be repeated. For one thing, varsity athletic schedules have changed quite a bit over the past 40 years, making it impossible for anyone today to coach both a winter and a spring sport. As an example, in 2006, the Big Red men's lacrosse team played their first game on February 25, while the hockey team didn't finish their season until March 26.
Not only did Harkness achieve greatness in two different sports, but he remains the only coach in college hockey history to win an NCAA championship at two different colleges. His cumulative win percentage of .740 is the second-best of any college hockey coach in history.
Although the eight years that Harkness spent at Cornell is only a small fraction of his career, to him it was the best; “I've had a very wonderful life, but Cornell was my favorite… I was thrilled to be here at Cornell.”
