Canadian head coaches in women’s hockey face daunting task: beat U.S., or just beat it

Opinion

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This article was published 13/02/2022 (1311 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING As coaching carousels go, it’s one of hockey’s most ruthless. As the Olympic women’s hockey tournament comes down to its short strokes, it’s worth remembering that Canada’s national team is on its eighth head coach in about 12 years.

Which, in some ways, is understandable. When the expectations are world supremacy or bust — beat the United States or beat it, essentially — longevity has proven hard to come by. So when general manager Gina Kingsbury installed Troy Ryan as head coach in 2020, maybe the forecast was foreboding. Defeating the U.S. was proving beyond difficult. The Americans had won eight of the most recent nine world championships. They’d beaten Canada for Olympic gold in a Pyeongchang shootout in 2018.

And Ryan, who had been an assistant coach to Laura Schuler at those 2018 Games and to Perry Pearn when Canada wobbled to a disappointing bronze at the 2019 worlds, said he was aware of the conventional wisdom that suggested the program needed a major overhaul.

“I think the mistake some coaches make is they let the ego get in the way and say, ‘All right. Now it’s my team. I’m going to blow it up,’” Ryan said. “And I think that would have been a foolish mentality. Because it’s not like Hockey Canada was a struggling program.”

Still, both Kingsbury and Ryan wanted change. And only a couple of years on, they’ve achieved plenty. Not only is Canada unbeaten in the Olympic tournament under Ryan heading into Monday’s semifinal against Switzerland (Sunday at 11:10 p.m. ET) — a run that’s included a 4-2 preliminary-round win over the U.S. — Canada is also the reigning world champion. While Pearn, Ryan’s predecessor, was 2-6 against the U.S., Ryan is 5-4.

What’s been the key to the turnaround? It’s never one thing. Ryan’s time has coincided with the emergence of a new generation of talent — 10 Olympic first-timers on the current roster — headlined by the show-stopping Sarah Fillier, whom Ryan coached at the under-18 level. Ryan has also no doubt benefited from the continuing emergence of the leadership group headlined by team captain Marie-Philip Poulin, who has worked her way up from 2010 fourth-liner to the sport’s preeminent big-goal provider.

But athletes will tell you Ryan’s success so far is as much about player development as it is about player empowerment. Natalie Spooner, the veteran forward, describes the atmosphere around the team since Ryan took over as “one of acceptance.” Ryan, who Kingsbury lauds for his “emotional intelligence” insists “a good coach coaches individuals.” By allowing players to be themselves — rather than seen as cookie-cutter pieces, either “rookie” or “veteran” — the hope is they’ll be free to perform at their best.

“People aren’t scared — scared to make mistakes, or to get less playing time, or to get cut,” said Jocelyne Larocque, the stalwart defender and three-time Olympian. “And I think that was kind of the mentality in the past, is that people would play a little bit fearful.”

Ryan, a 50-year-old native of Spryfield, N.S., who got the coaching bug playing at the University of New Brunswick under Mike Johnston, later an NHL coach in Vancouver and Pittsburgh, said one of his priorities has been to foster a two-way dialogue between Canada’s leadership core and the coaching staff, this while handing off certain decision-making powers to players. If the national coach prototype is a control-freak taskmaster who harps on defensive schemes, Ryan is a soft-spoken proponent of delegation who’s spent most of the team’s practice time honing an offensive system.

“One thing we’ve talked about as a group: We don’t want to play safe. We want to take risks,” said Ryan. “We’re prepared to live with some of the consequences that sometimes come with it.”

If the reality of the highly competitive national team program means players are constantly being evaluated, the ingrained culture of conservative play made sense.

“When you’re constantly under the microscope to make a team, you don’t step outside your comfort zone to add to your game,” Ryan said.

At his first training camp as head coach, Ryan essentially called a timeout on that mentality.

“I wanted to add some things that were going to be really hard for them,” Ryan said.

Ryan’s curriculum was extensive, but a small example was the high flip. You know the play, hockey’s version of football’s punt. A player is approaching, say, a clogged neutral zone with no obvious outlet. So instead of succumbing to an icing or, worse, a giveaway, the puck is flung high into the air, soft enough not to be icing, hard enough to see it land out of danger. Ryan saw the flip wasn’t used much in the women’s game. He figured Canada could use it to their advantage.

At a training camp in January of last year, Ryan had his players flipping pucks in quantity. It wasn’t a familiar skill.

“It was definitely challenging, especially when there’s pressure on you,” Larocque said. “Sometimes your flip only ends up going a foot off the ice.”

The payoff wasn’t immediate.

“At first we were flipping pucks, we were turning them over, they’re coming the other way and we’re getting scored on. There was a bunch of that,” Ryan said. “I just told them, ‘At some point we’re going to decide whether this is game ready or not.’ Now it’s part of our game.’

The high flip won’t be the difference between winning and losing here. But it’s a small detail illustrative of a larger shift.

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“The bigger part of it was getting across the idea that they can try things, that they can think offensively, that they can go out there and play,” Ryan said.

That’s “play,” as in, enjoy the game, not dread making a mistake.

There’s still a long way to go until gold, but the results, so far, have been enlivening for a program with a reputation as a head coach’s graveyard.

“I think if you just look at those (world championship) games, I think the big thing is the confidence they played with, and the lack of pressure they seemed to play with,” Ryan said. “They seemed relaxed. They seemed to be enjoying each other. Some of those things are very underestimated, the power they have on a team. If you’re not feeling the weight of the world and you’re enjoying taking calculated risks when you’re playing, some good things can happen.”

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk