For the week of May 27 thru June 2, 1998  

 

Yale’s Taylor is top college hockey coach

Wins Spencer Penrose Award


Yale University men’s ice hockey coach Tim Taylor has been voted the Spencer Penrose award as the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division 1 "Coach of the Year."

Taylor, 55, is raising his children in the Wood River Valley and has spent time here.

One of the most respected names in the game of hockey, 20-year Yale coach Taylor enjoyed his greatest season behind the Bulldog bench in 1997-98. He led the Elis to a 23-9-3 recordmost wins in school history—and guided Yale to its first berth in the NCAA Division 1 hockey tournament in 46 years, dating back to 1952.

Keep in mind that Yale has played hockey since 1896, when a tie against John Hopkins was reputed to be the first intercollegiate hockey game ever playedand Yale has a 954-986-85 all-time record. The sport goes way back in New Haven, Ct.

Taylor swept all the big coach-of-the-year awards including the national honor. He was voted as the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) "Coach of the Year," for the third time, along with his elections in 1987 and 1992.

Projected as the 10th-place finisher in the ECAC based on its 10-19-1 record the previous season, Yale shocked nearly everyone in the college hockey establishment this past winter and drew record crowds in its 3,486-seat Ingalls "Yale Whale" Rink. Under Taylor’s tutelage, Yale won the Ivy League championship for the fourth time.

Taylor has always focused on team defense, and he had two of the best this season with ECAC "Player of the Year" and Best Defensive Defenseman Ray Giroux along with Ken Dryden Award winning goalie Alex Westlund. Giroux was senior captain, while Westlund was a junior and one of the nation’s top goalies all winter.

Voted Yale captain for the 1998-99 season is Keith McCullough, a faceoff specialist and three-time letterman form Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.

You may remember Taylor as coach of the 1994 U.S. Olympic hockey team at Lillehammer, Norway. Twenty of the 33 Yale players this past season were born in the United States.

Other international assignments on Taylor’s resume include a leave-of-absence from Yale as assistant general manager and assistant coach for the 1984 U.S. Olympic team; a two-time assistant for the U.S. National Team in 1981 and 1983; and head coach of the U.S. National Team in World Championship competition for four straight years in the 1990s.

Since he took over at Yale in the 1976-77 season, Taylor has a 246-289-38 record putting him second on Yale’s all-time list behind the legendary J. Murray Murdoch (1938-65), who posted 263 wins in 27 seasons.

Taylor, a 1963 Harvard graduate, spent seven years as an assistant at his alma mater before becoming Yale’s 10th head coach. He captained the 1963 Crimson team that won the Ivy League and the ECAC Championships, and tallied 46 goals and 33 assists for 79 career points in 68 collegiate games. Taylor made the U.S. national team in 1965 and 1967.

He is considered one of the top strategists in the sport.

The 1997-98 Yale team that was featured in the Feb. 26 issue of Sports Illustrated made the game fun again for Taylor. He had been disconsolate in the wake of the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer when the American men failed to win a game for the first time in Olympic history.

Quoted in the Boston Globe, Taylor said, "It was the low point in my coaching psyche. I was wondering whether I should be coaching. Before I came back to Yale, I had to make up my mind that I was going to be able to put enough enthusiasm into the job to get it going again.

"This year, we didn’t dominate in any one phase of the game. But I think we had a smart, resourceful team that had a lot of spunk. We had some good on-ice intelligence, and we were capable of playing pretty good defense."

 

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