The competitive ranks of New England prep hockey draw players to this region from near and far. No matter where home is, they all come for the chance to gain exposure and chase the dream of playing at the college level.
A major advantage of playing in this neck of the woods is that there are 20 Division 1 programs within the borders of our six states among Hockey East, the ECAC and Atlantic Hockey. Big schools, small schools. New England is often called a hockey hotbed for a reason. The options for college prospects are many.
Though the region’s prep scene is ripe with talent, the majority of players don’t set foot on a college campus until they play a season or two of junior hockey. However, there are New England-based teams in all three of the aforementioned conferences that pulled players into their programs directly from the prep circuit.
“I’m one of those coaches that believes you don’t have to go to juniors,” said University of Connecticut head coach Mike Cavanaugh (North Andover, Mass.), whose club includes freshman defenseman Jake Flynn of Thayer Academy and Bridgewater, Mass., and sophomore forward Marc Gatcomb of Gunnery and Woburn, Mass. “We recruit a lot of junior players and certain players can certainly benefit from a year of juniors.
“Would Jake benefit from a year of juniors? Sure. On the same token, could he still come in and play for us right away? I felt that if we let him go to juniors there’s no chance we were getting him this year, so we made him an offer and told him that we wanted him right away. That was our hook to get him and I’m sure glad we did.”
Flynn began his college career in Storrs just months after graduating from Thayer. At the Braintree, Mass., prep school, former Boston University star and NHLer Tony Amonte (Hingham, Mass.) coached him for four seasons.
There are few better mentors that a young player could have than Amonte when it comes to developing a responsible all-around game for the next level. The 18-year-old Flynn already has seen his game improve while playing alongside older teammates at UConn, making a similar adjustment to a quicker pace of play as he did four years ago as a freshman at Thayer.
Though he is just 6-foot, 180 pounds, Flynn has adapted quickly to the college game and skated as one of UConn’s top-four defensemen early in the season. Along with all that he has learned from Cavanaugh and the rest of the Huskies staff, he still remembers one of Amonte’s words of wisdom to this day.
“The biggest lessons from Tony were about battle and work ethic,” Flynn said. “Over four years at Thayer, he really instilled in us that you have to win games off of winning battles. I’ve improved a lot playing down low, systematically, since I’ve been here and I think just being around such good players has helped me a lot.”
The story was similar for Harvard’s John Farinacci, a Red Bank, N.J., native and the Arizona Coyotes 2019 third-round draft pick whose uncles are his former Dexter head coach Dan Donato and current Harvard boss Ted Donato, both Dedham, Mass., natives.
The Dexter-to-Harvard trail is nothing new, having been blazed by the likes of former ECAC Player of the Year and now-Minnesota Wild forward Ryan Donato (Scituate, Mass.) and Crimson sophomore defenseman Jack Rathbone (West Roxbury, Mass.). That experience helped make Farinacci’s transition easier, allowing him to come right in and score eight points in his first seven games.
“I know Dan Donato pushed me a lot last year to play with more speed because he knew that’s what they would expect here,” Farinacci said. “Rathbone has been through it, and Jack Donato, so those guys have helped me along the way. It’s good to have their support and be able to talk to them. There are going to be some tough games and some good games, but you have to take the good with the bad as it comes.”
Like many prep coaches, Dave Ries has helped dozens of players ready for their futures at all levels of college hockey over more than a decade at Brooks School. In fact, a pair of his program’s Independent School League MVPs went right to college from the North Andover, Mass., campus in Boston University-turned-Arizona State goaltender Max Prawdzik (Andover, Mass.) and former Sacred Heart forward and two-year captain Mitch Nylen, who hails from Georgia and now plays in the ECHL.
The roles of future collegians on prep school rosters are mostly prominent, but one key to a player making his immediate move to the next level smoother is making sure that he recognizes and settles into the right role.
“The biggest thing has to be adaptability,” Ries said. “A lot of those kids were our best players or one of our best players. Some of them track into those roles at the next level but some of them don’t. Being able to figure out what their strengths are and how that fits into the lineup and the pace in college is very important.”
Like Nylen, Vito Bavaro’s hockey journey took him immediately from being a captain at Brooks to Sacred Heart. Bavaro was a regular and eventual captain during his four-year prep career, helping the program to two New England championships. His experience there set the foundation for a productive college tenure that will conclude over the next few months.
Bavaro’s strong work ethic and speed helped him have an impact right away at Sacred Heart, scoring seven goals as a freshman and 16 the following year as he finished as the 12th-leading scorer in Atlantic Hockey, Through the first half of his senior year, Bavaro was the top career scorer on the Pioneers with 40 goals and 75 points in 124 games.
Those numbers certainly have contributed to SHU’s ascension to second place in this season’s league standings at the semester break, but the prep school experience helped Bavaro recognize that there was so much more to bring to the locker room than just ability on the ice and adjusting to a new level of play as a freshman.
“Prep school makes you a well-rounded person because it’s not just about hockey,” said Bavaro. “You have to know how to balance your life, be a good student and be able to interact with coaches, teammates and other students. You can have great hockey at a lot of places, but prep school opens you to so many new types of people and sets a standard for your life and having success on the ice. I was able to transfer all of that right to college and it helped me because I was just used to it.”
But it wasn’t always easy. Bavaro had just turned 19 years old when the Pioneers were handed a 7-0 defeat against a Boston University team that included the likes of current NHLers Clayton Keller, Charlie McAvoy and Dante Fabbro.
“We walked into Agganis and, inevitably, they had all these kids playing in the NHL right now,” Bavaro said. “I remember skating out for warm-ups and being like, ‘Holy crap, what am I doing here?’ That was the moment I realized that I’m not in North Andover playing against Pingree School on a Friday night anymore.”
It’s safe to say that things have changed a lot since that night of Oct. 21, 2016.
On Nov. 26, 2019, the Pioneers handed a shutout back to BU, 4-0. That was the moment that Bavaro’s hockey career came full circle.
“Part of being an older guy in college hockey is that you learn from past experiences,” he said. “You have to remember the guys you played with that were good leaders. All you have to leave in college hockey is your legacy and what you did for a program.
“One of the freshmen came up to me after that game (at BU). I was sitting at my stall, just thinking about the game and he said to me, ‘Hey, Vito, did you ever think your freshman year that you’d come into Agganis and win like this?’ I hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but it made me reflect on everything we have gone through as a program over the last 3½ years. We’ve been getting better every year and that win was special.”
Though he’s now just a sophomore, Northeastern defenseman Jordan Harris thinks the same way. Just two years after the Haverhill, Mass., native was playing for New England power Kimball Union, he has been given the opportunity to represent his country as a member of the preliminary United States roster for the 2020 IIHF World Junior Championship.
Harris, too, has come a long way in a short amount of time, now skating as one of the Huskies’ top defensemen and mentoring a freshman blueliner who has traveled down a very similar path in former St. Sebastian’s star Jayden Struble (Cumberland, R.I.).
“He came in as a skilled, raw player who’s had a great career so far and you can already see him translating it to the college game,” Harris said of Struble, the Montreal Canadiens’ second-round draft pick this year. “He’s intelligent enough to make that jump pretty quickly, but I’m sure his continued growth over the next year or so is going to be tremendous.
“There are a lot of similarities between us. For me, prep school was really good hockey and a great experience overall. I thought it was definitely beneficial for me to play at that level before coming to college.”
@JoshuaKummins
