The road from Virginia to New Haven, Conn., isn’t necessarily as circuitous as one might believe, even if you take a three-year side trip to the Midwest.
Yale University senior forward Joe Snively would know. The 5-foot-9, 165-pound native of Herndon, Va., has led the Bulldogs in points in each of his three previous NCAA seasons and is poised to do so again before his current and final college campaign wraps up in the spring.
“Joe’s been an elite offensive player since the moment he walked in the door here,” said longtime Yale head coach and former Bulldogs goaltender Keith Allain (Worcester, Mass.). “He’s done a really good job for us and for himself, expanding upon his game.”
Last year Snively recorded a career-high 19 goals among his 36 total points and earned All-ECAC Hockey second-team accolades. He actually got his start in his home state thanks to his father, who grew up playing hockey in Montreal, and the son then followed suit down south.
“I played AAA hockey in the D.C. area, and partook in the USA Hockey festivals in the summer,” recalled Snively.
Herndon is located in Virginia’s Fairfax County and in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region. It’s produced professional baseball, football and soccer players, but no notable individuals in hockey — at least, not yet.
After a year of Midget hockey with the Selects Hockey Academy 16U at South Kent School in 2011-12, Snively spent the next three seasons prepping for the collegiate ranks with the United States Hockey League’s Sioux City Musketeers. He was tabbed by Sioux City in the fourth round of the USHL’s 2012 Futures Draft and later made the team in tryouts.
“I’ve learned lessons like playing hard, being tenacious, moving the feet and being heavy on the bottom end,” Snively told the Sioux City Journal as his junior career in Iowa was winding down. “I learned to act professional off and on the ice.
“I’m always going to be the smaller guy,” he added. “I just learned how to play like it. I’ve always been small growing up. It didn’t affect me at all. I try to use my quickness to catch guys off-guard. I try to make plays while being evasive.”
Sounds quite a bit like a former ECAC and University of Vermont forward who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame last year, following a memorable professional career that included more than 1,000 NHL points, an MVP award and a Stanley Cup championship.
“As an undersized player, I always admired smaller forwards in the NHL,” said Snively. “Players like Martin St. Louis were guys I looked up to.”
Snively, 23, seems to have adapted just as well to the all-around rigors of high-level hockey, despite his smaller frame. “Joe’s the complete package,” said Snively’s USHL coach, Jay Varady, back when Snively was closing the book on his junior career. “He plays 5-on-5, 5-on-4, 4-on-5, 3-on-5, 5-on-3, 4-on-4. … If there’s a situation, he’s on the ice for us.”
A former Union College forward himself, Varady has since moved on from Sioux City to the American Hockey League’s Tucson Roadrunners, after he spent last season coaching Kingston in the Ontario Hockey League.
Following a modest 16-point inaugural year in 2012-13 as he acclimated to junior hockey, Snively blossomed to 45 points his second season in Sioux City, then capped things off his final term with 27 goals and 64 points. It was off to Yale afterward, where from the get-go he has led the Bulldogs in scoring and hasn’t stopped despite the competition faced night in and night out in places such as Cambridge, Hamden, Hanover and Providence.
“The ECAC is a tough league where any team can win on any given night,” said Snively. “There’s only 29 regular-season games, and college hockey games are intense and high-paced.”
As a freshman, he put up 10 goals and 28 points in 32 outings in helping Yale to its final NCAA tournament berth to date, a 3-2 overtime loss to UMass Lowell in a 2016 NCAA East Regional semifinal in Albany. As a sophomore he collected a career-high 25 assists and 39 points, including a 12-game scoring streak that spanned from November to January and produced 17 points.
Following last year’s career-best goal showing, Snively again paced Yale with 10 goals and 21 points through his first 18 games of the 2018-19 season. Included in those totals were a goal and an assist in a 6-3 victory over UConn at the Friendship Four in Belfast, Ireland, just after Thanksgiving.
“He’s a guy we can use in pretty much any situation,” added Allain, echoing Varady’s comments about Snively at the junior level. “Joe’s on the power play, he’s on the penalty kill, and I’m comfortable with him playing against the other team’s top line. He’s really grown his game in his time at Yale, and has a bright future ahead of him.”
Snively is just the second Virginian ever to lace up his skates for Yale’s varsity squad and the first in the last half-century. Besides the lure of Division 1 hockey, the attraction of an Ivy League education at one of America’s most storied universities also was too much to turn down. “I’m a political science major,” related Snively. “My favorite courses have been political science seminars in small-sized classes.”
Away from the classroom, Snively has attended NHL development camps with the New York Rangers and Buffalo Sabres. He’s also represented the United States in the 2013 Hlinka Gretzky Cup and won a gold medal with the U.S. Selects at the 2015 Under-19 World Junior Challenge. In between, he helped Sioux City to a bronze medal at the Junior Club World Cup in Ufa, Russia, in 2014.
“Attending NHL development camps was a learning experience for me and gave me a glimpse of professional hockey,” he admitted. “It was also an opportunity to compare yourself to other players from major junior and Europe. It’s one way to see if you can compete with an NHL team’s prospects.”
Those camps also spurred Snively to more fully realize his supreme objective as a player.
“My goal after I graduate from Yale is to ultimately play professional hockey,” he admitted.
If the NHL does show up in his playing future, he would follow former Yale classmates such as John Hayden (Greenwich, Conn.), who’s suited up at forward for the Chicago Blackhawks, and goaltender Alex Lyon, who has seen stints in net with the Philadelphia Flyers.
The Bulldogs, almost six years removed from a national title under Allain with a different cast of playing characters, are now seeking to get back to the NCAAs for the first time since Snively’s freshman year. To do that, they’d have to run a conference gamut that could include the likes of Ivy League foe Cornell and next-door neighbor Quinnipiac, both of whom sat ahead of third-place Yale in the ECAC Hockey standings as of mid-January.
The Bulldogs had yet to face Connecticut rival Quinnipiac as the first month of the year came to a close, although Snively figured in on both Yale goals in a 4-2 setback at Cornell in early November. Yale stood 9-6-3 overall and 7-3-1 in league play as of Jan. 21, after falling to Clarkson and beating St. Lawrence the weekend prior. The Bulldogs were 1-2-1 in Ivy League contests to that point, with six Ivy games to go on the schedule.
This season’s Yale ledger included a five-game winning string straddling November and December that included consecutive victories over league foes St. Lawrence, Clarkson, Rensselaer and Union. Snively’s two-goal, three-point effort against Union also earned him ECAC Hockey Player of the Week accolades, the third time he had been so honored in his college career, on a résumé that also includes one ECAC Hockey Player of the Month award (January 2016).
“Every team in our league makes the playoffs, so I believe our team has a great chance of winning,” said Snively. “If we are playing our best hockey at the end of February, I am confident we can wreak some havoc in the playoffs. We have great goaltending, which will help us, too.”
The Bulldogs last advanced past the ECAC quarterfinals in 2013, where they lost to eventual conference champion Union but then later won the NCAA crown. Yale’s last ECAC Hockey tournament title came in 2011, one year after back-to-back regular-season championships.
Senior netminder Sam Tucker (Wilton, Conn.) and junior Corbin Kaczperski had combined for a 9-6-3 record, a 2.67 goals-against average and one shutout through Yale’s first 18 outings this winter.
The Bulldogs also were getting regular contributions from New England natives such as junior blueliner Bill Sweezey (Hanson, Mass.), while sophomore forward Kevin O’Neil was second on the squad to Snively with four goals and 14 points.
