Paul Flanagan points to a photograph to the right of the door in his spacious corner office. In the picture, 12 girls are standing at the blue line before a sparse crowd at the Tennity Ice Skating Pavilion. Their sticks are held straight as their eyes focus on the North American flags they’re paying respect to overhead.

The bubbled blue-lettered caption reads ‘The Beginning,’ with ‘October 13th, 2008’ right beneath. Stefanie Marty is in this picture. She may as well have painted it.

‘She was definitely the primary building block when we got the program started,’ said Flanagan, the Syracuse ice hockey coach. ‘You couldn’t manufacture a better player to build a program around.’

Marty transferred to Syracuse in the fall of 2008 after playing minimally in her freshman season at New Hampshire. Upon arrival, she helped build stability at a tentative new program. And now she’s the face of the third-year program.

A Nussbaumen, Switzerland, native, Marty had played hockey at a professional level since the age of 15 in her home country. In 2003, she signed with the Swiss professional team EV Zug. She was selected to the national team the same year.

But in 2007, she moved to America in pursuit of a better education. A powerful forward with a whistling slap shot, Marty became the ideal attacking scorer for Flanagan to build his offense around. In the program’s inaugural season in 2008-09, she led the team in scoring with 22 points. And her high-level competitive experience made her the perfect prototype for Flanagan to build his program around.

‘Even as a sophomore,’ Flanagan said, ‘she was so dedicated in everything, from how she ate to how she trained.’

In just its third season as a program, SU has graduated from an expansion laughingstock to a bonafide contender in the College Hockey America conference. After finishing last in 2008-09, the Orange finished second last year. This season, at 4-2-1, the program has maintained its elevated conference status while building a competitive national profile. Already this season, Syracuse has a win over a nationally ranked team when it bet then-No. 8 New Hampshire on Oct. 8.

And in many ways, Marty’s development as a player is a mirror image of the program she’s helping to build. Just look at the differences between her two Olympic experiences as a member of the Swiss national team. As an 18-year-old playing on a global stage for the first time in 2006, Marty said she and her teammates weren’t quite ready for the magnitude of the event. She didn’t record a point as her Swiss team was eliminated in three quick games.

‘That was the first Olympics for the whole team,’ Marty said. ‘It was really hard to focus on just hockey with all the external distractions.’

But by the 2010 games, Marty was a 21-year-old international veteran who had represented her country in five World Championships and the 2006 Olympics. Focusing strictly on hockey, she recorded an Olympic-record nine goals while leading her team to a fifth-place finish.

With her performance in last year’s Olympics, Marty too had graduated from those initial stages of inexperience that marked both her first Olympics and the inaugural season of the SU program.

‘Four years later, we knew what to expect,’ Marty said.

And now at SU, she knows what to expect: a dynamic offensive threat with the fearless personality that has made her into a leader.

Marty is currently fourth on the Orange with eight points through the team’s first seven games. And she is tied for second on SU with four goals.

Back in his office, Flanagan has shifted his focus to the 30-inch flat screen attached to a straight-ahead wall. The NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins and New Jersey Devils are playing on the screen. Flanagan points to Sidney Crosby and discusses how the Penguins wunderkind provided a much-needed spark for a fledging NHL franchise.

‘Kind of like what Stef Marty is doing for us,’ he said.

‘Making Syracuse hockey matter.’

jdsaffre@syr.edu

Published on October 25, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Jarrad: jdsaffre@syr.edu