Ben Smith Ben Smith played hockey at Harvard University and graduated in 1968 . Playing career . For three of his four years at Harvard , Ben Smith was on the men ’ s hockey team . His coach was the legendary Cooney Weiland . One of his teammates was Bill Cleary ( who would go on to become the Harvard athletic director ) . 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 at Amherst . After several years of coaching high school hockey in Gloucester , Massachusetts , 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 Final Four in 1990 , 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 program , the team he would coach the following season . Northeastern Huskies . Smith became the Northeastern in 1991 , and inherited a team that had 8 wins , 25 losses and 2 ties in the 1990 - 91 season . One of the worst moments of Smith ’ s coaching career came on February 12 , 1996 at the Beanpot . The tournament was contested at the FleetCenter in Boston . Against Boston University , the Northeastern Huskies were losing by a score of 10 - 3 . When BU forward Brendan Walsh scored the 10th goal , Huskies goaltender Todd Reynolds did the right thing and left the net and walked past a completely embarrassed and humiliated Smith into the locker room . The moment was considered very embarrassing by many in the New England Media and Smith was made to look foolish by a justified Reynolds . They final stake in the heart for Smith ' s dismal career was his coaching relationship with Bob Richardson . Richardson was Smith ' s assistant coach at Northeastern University . After Northeastern , Richardson was running hockey camps and coaching at Milton Academy in Massachusetts when in July of 2003 he was arrested on child rape charges . Rightfully or wrongly many in the hockey community in Massachusetts looked at Smith in a different light because of his very close relationship with Richardson . However , Richardson was acquitted of the child rape charges in September 2005 . USA Hockey . 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 . As the coach of the Women ’ s National Team , one of the stupidist moves of his career came when he cut Cammi Granato from the 2006 Olympic team .