For Cornell’s Beau Starrett, hockey is a family affair

(Photo courtesy of Cornell Athletics)

 

Fans of NHL players can easily point out that some superstars were just born to play hockey. In other cases, family history can be a harbinger of success, or at least an indicator of potential.

For Cornell Big Red sophomore forward Beau Starrett, it is a mixture of both.

Starrett has ties across all of college hockey in his immediate family. As the youngest of four brothers, he benefited from growing up in a household where a trip to a rink was routine.

“Having three brothers play hockey is pretty rare,” Starrett admitted in an interview with Pucks and Recreation.  “It was always something big in our family, whether it was hockey clinics or games. It was always good to have brothers to look up to and push me to do better.”

Starrett’s siblings can write quite an interesting hockey story. His oldest brother, Pete, played at Harvard from 2008 to 2012, while Troy, the second-oldest, was a captain at Babson College’s Division III program. Shane Starrett is currently a sophomore goaltender playing for the Air Force Academy.

“It is funny, because we always have a little friendly competition between each other to help us perform,” laughed Beau. “We almost have a full line of hockey players with two forwards, a defenseman and a goalie.”

Beyond the friendly competition, Starrett had multiple family members he could model his game after.

“Growing up, I remember attending my older brothers’ games,” said Starrett. “I remember going to Harvard-versus-Cornell and feeling the electric atmosphere during that game. I knew that Cornell had a great program and it has been a good journey getting to this point.”

 

Starrett, who battled back from two long-term injuries in as many seasons in 2014-15 and 2015-16: “I just remember who and what motivates me to do better.” (Photo courtesy of Cornell Athletics)

 

Finding his own way

That journey has not always been easy. You could say that being the youngest sibling in a hockey family imposes immense pressure to perform, but Beau has had to face many challenges in his playing career, the most significant of which have been injuries.

One ailment limited him to just seven games in his final season with the South Shore Kings of the USPHL. Another one early last season only allowed him to play 15 games for Cornell.

“I view the injuries as a speed bump,” said Starrett. “They have motivated me to do whatever it takes to overcome challenges.”

Starrett’s desire to push past these injuries and focus on hockey has helped enable the Cornell team to get off to a quick start this season. With a goal in this past Friday’s victory over Miami, Starrett helped the Big Red push a winning streak to four games.

Starrett credits his hockey family for his ability to supersede any future challenges that come his way.

“I just remember who and what motivates me to do better,” said Starrett, who hopes to play for the Chicago Blackhawks after they selected him in the 2014 NHL Draft. He knows that he could be presented with a possibility that could be even rarer than having three older hockey-playing brothers who play hockey, and that is a playing career in the professional ranks.

“Peter works as a financial consultant and Troy works in wealth management,” said Starrett about his brothers’ success outside the rink. “However, I would like to keep playing for as long as possible. It is tough to get away from the hockey world.”

 

- John Morton

Olympian Brianne Jenner keeping competitive torch at Cornell

Inject a quiz whiz with Brianne Jenner’s compete level, and the go-getter could sop up six figures on Jeopardy!, then crave conquest in a tri-county trivia tournament. Give Jenner’s fire to a fisherwoman, and she can catch an urban legend before pursuing the same salmon supper she has caught for the past three neighborhood cookouts.

That is the extent of Jenner’s insatiability. Coming off a gold medal in her first Olympic endeavor with Team Canada, the belated Cornell women’s hockey senior is fixated on unfinished business in the NCAA realm.

“Last year was a big year,” she offered in a phone interview with Along the Boards this week. “It was an accomplishment of my dream in many ways. But a month after that was over, I was excited to get back to Cornell.

“Athletes are competitive people, and always focused on the next challenge.”

Scale and scope of press coverage aside, no challenge is too grand or too minor, too stale or too novel for Jenner.

The Oakville, Ont., native is barely 11 months removed from cutting into Team USA’s 2-0 lead with 3:26 to spare in regulation, sparking Canada’s comeback in the Sochi Games title tilt. Marie-Philip Poulin, herself a belated senior at Boston University this year, proceeded to force overtime and score the sudden-death decider for the 3-2 victory.

With that, Jenner punctuated her arrival on the international platform by pitching in to preserve her country’s Olympic dynasty with a fourth consecutive gold medal.

Fast-forward to the present. With less than a full month to spare in the regular season, she is helping the Big Red dig out of an initial pothole as they defend another ECAC Hockey crown.

Dating back to 2009-10, the year before Jenner arrived, Cornell has been to five straight conference title tilts. It has won four of those, with the exception of 2012, when a 30-5-0 overall finish more than warranted at at-large bid to the exclusive, eight-team NCAA tournament.

But after starting this season at 3-6-0, the Big Red will need a near-perfect finish down the stretch to avoid an unfamiliar reliance on the automatic bid that comes with the league playoff pennant.

In a way, Jenner’s momentary deletion from Cornell’s roster may now be yielding pivotal benefits on that front.

Had she whiffed on a spot for Canada’s pre-Olympic centralization tour, the Big Red would likely be looking at a two-member senior class in 2014-15. In addition, they may have had a maximum allotment of 16 skaters instead of 17 — still one fewer than the conventional game-day quorum.

Instead, she is allying with Emily Fulton and Jillian Saulnier to pilot the offense and impart the intangibles to five juniors and nine underclass skaters. She and Saulnier most recently tallied four points apiece to steamroll Union, 8-2, Friday afternoon, improving the Big Red to 8-1-3 since Thanksgiving.

“We’re a much younger team now, so it took us a while to understand what kind of hockey we needed to play,” Jenner said of the preceding slump.

She added, “It has been a challenge this year. We had a really tough schedule early on. Obviously, that’s not any excuse, but it kind of forced us to face some adversity and reflect on our game. We’ve been working really hard and we’re really confident in the team we’ve become.

“We have all the bits and pieces here, and it’s going to be up to us.”

Now 11-7-3 overall, and with eight regular-season games still to come, Cornell cannot afford to stop kicking ice chips over its acrid autumn. As of Friday evening, its sits at No. 10 on the PairWise leaderboard.

At the start of this weekend’s action, four other ECAC tenants alone — Quinnipiac, Harvard, Clarkson and St. Lawrence — were ahead of the Big Red in the national qualifier projection. Yet they are still higher than any to-be-determined College Hockey America program that has its name on an automatic bid.

A clean sweep through the homestretch could fortify the Big Red’s position. Although, beyond a Feb. 6 visit to Quinnipiac and a Feb. 13 home date with Harvard, there are not many opportunities to bulk up on big-game loot.

Regardless, whether it is Canada or Cornell, the pride factor is all the same for Jenner, who has also won gold at the 2010 Four Nations Cup and 2012 World Championship.

“I think there is some parallel. We’ve built a really sound program here,” she said of the Big Red. “This year, we are a bit more of an underdog, but we’re okay with that as well.”

A veteran of two Frozen Fours, but no national championship games, Jenner has no time to worry about her team’s billing. Just like the discrepancies in prestige between tournaments, that cannot alter her appetite for a fulfilling finish to a given campaign.

For her senior season in Ithaca, that entails a timely surge en route to an ECAC championship three-peat, followed by the program’s last unchecked breakthrough. This year’s Frozen Four happens to be at Minnesota’s Ridder Arena, where Cornell lost a 3-2 triple-overtime marathon to Minnesota-Duluth in the 2010 title game, its last game before Jenner enrolled.

“It’s hard to compare to the Olympics, because that’s something everyone works toward their whole life,” she admits. “But a lot of really elite hockey players strive for an NCAA championship, and I’m capable of that.”

 

This article originally appeared on Along the Boards