Benjamin Atwood Smith III is a former American ice hockey player and Olympic coach.

Early life

Smith was born in

Gloucester, Massachusetts Gloucester () is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. It sits on Cape Ann and is a part of Massachusetts's North Shore. The population was 29,729 at the 2020 U.S. Census. An important center of the fishing industry and a ...

. His father was

Benjamin A. Smith II Benjamin Atwood Smith II (March 26, 1916 – September 26, 1991) was an American politician who served as a member of the United States Senate from December 1960 until November 1962. Early life and education Smith, who was named for his grandfat ...

, a U.S. Senator.

Playing career

Smith played ice hockey at Harvard University and graduated in 1968. For three of his four years at Harvard, Ben Smith was on the men's hockey team. His coach was

Cooney Weiland Ralph "Cooney" Weiland (November 5, 1904 – July 3, 1985) was a Canadian ice hockey forward who played for the Boston Bruins, Ottawa Senators, and Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League (NHL). Weiland was part of the Bruins' 1928 "Dy ...

Coaching career

Upon graduation from Harvard, Weiland advised Smith to make coaching a career. In autumn 1968, Smith served as an assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After several years of coaching high school hockey in

, Smith became an assistant with the Yale Bulldogs. Smith left Yale to become an assistant with the Boston University Terriers. At BU, Smith worked with Jack Parker, who played for BU while Smith played at Harvard. Smith's time at BU would represent some of the first success in his coaching career. After helping to lead the Terriers to the

NCAA Frozen Four The annual NCAA Division I Men's Ice Hockey Tournament is a college ice hockey tournament held in the United States by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to determine the top men's team in Division I. Like other Division I cham ...

1990 File:1990 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1990 FIFA World Cup is played in Italy; The Human Genome Project is launched; Voyager I takes the famous Pale Blue Dot image- speaking on the fragility of Humankind, humanity on Earth, Astroph ...

, he accepted the head coaching job for the Dartmouth Big Green. In his first and only season with Dartmouth, he had 1 win, 24 losses and 3 ties. His only victory was against the Northeastern Huskies, the team he would coach the following season. Smith became the Northeastern coach in 1991, inheriting a team that had 8 wins, 25 losses and 2 ties in the 1990–91 season. While he was an assistant coach at Boston University, he took a year off from BU to assume a role as the assistant coach of the U.S. men's hockey team in Ice hockey at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Ten years later, Smith would return to the Olympics as the coach of the first ever US women's team. Smith coached the first three women's Olympic teams and won a gold (1998), silver (2002) and bronze (2006) medal. In 2009, the 1998 U.S. Olympic Women's Ice Hockey Team was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame. Smith is known for his self-deprecating style and the "amusing and often puzzling sayings" that he uses to motivate his players, such as "The hay is in the barn, ladies".

Head coaching record

Honors

Smith was elected to the US Hockey Hall of Fame in 2017.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Ben Living people Boston University Terriers men's ice hockey coaches Dartmouth Big Green men's ice hockey coaches Harvard Crimson men's ice hockey players Northeastern Huskies men's ice hockey coaches Sportspeople from Gloucester, Massachusetts UMass Minutemen ice hockey coaches Yale Bulldogs men's ice hockey coaches Year of birth missing (living people) IIHF Hall of Fame inductees American men's ice hockey defensemen