Mount Hermon hockey games drew pretty good crowds.  It was a boys school, after all, and on winter afternoons there wasn’t much to do, though I think that might’ve been the last winter the ski rope tow ran up Memorial Hill. 

You had to be hardy to watch a Mount Hermon hockey game, standing along the boards, hopping around to keep warm. 

I remember Frank Parker—a burly, jovial junior whose dad was the Bud distributor for Westchester—being one of the lead animators of the crowd.  Frank was also an unending source of Bud promotional material, especially Bud Man decals and so forth.  Pure gold in a boarding school back then.

On a table near the north entrance of the rink, West Hall provided urns of hot chocolate, coffee, even beef broth, but between periods  most fans booked it up the hill to Forslund to get warm, perhaps in the process catching something of a basketball game, swim meet or wrestling match—all three venues warm and humid.

As for the games, I don’t remember any 1970-71 Mount Hermon varsity hockey games all that clearly.  How I can remember the players so vividly and not remember specific games very well is a bit of a mystery. So I can only hope that any guys from the 1970-71 team who read this and do remember their games well will share their memories with me by clicking on Contact Us (or otherwise emailing me at edpitoniak@gmail.com). Send me your memories and then I’ll incorporate them into this narrative.

Just to get it out of the way, the 1970-71 Mount Hermon team lost to the Alumni in a defensive battle, 9 to 8. Doug Smith, the pride of Cranston, must’ve come back from Brown for the game and gone wild.

Against prep schools, Mount Hermon finished the season with 10 wins and 4 losses, losing to only four other prep schools: Deerfield (2 losses); Tabor; Exeter, Lenox.  Poor Williston, they must’ve been pretty sick of Mount Hermon by season’s end, losing 3 times. 

Here’s the scorecard for games against other prep schools (alumni game excluded):

Again, I hope guys from the 1970-71 team will share their memories of these games.

And I hope, 43 years later, that life has been good to all of them—the players, Deane and Al.