The Canadian girls’s hockey group is in the hunt for a brand new normal supervisor in addition to a coach at a time when Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League groups have been scooping up candidates.
Hockey Canada introduced Tuesday that normal supervisor Gina Kingsbury won’t return subsequent season after eight years overseeing the nationwide girls’s group.
Kingsbury can be GM of the PWHL’s Toronto Sceptres.
Troy Ryan, who gained three world championships and an Olympic gold medal within the six years after Kingsbury promoted him to move coach, indicated after February’s Milan Cortina Winter Olympics that he wouldn’t proceed teaching Canada’s girls.
Ryan was just lately employed as head coach and GM of the PWHL’s growth group in San Jose after three seasons teaching Kingsbury’s Sceptres.
Hockey Canada’s contracts with Kingsbury and Ryan have been to run out in June. The group stated the parting with each was by mutual settlement.
After a taking part in profession that included Olympic gold medals in 2006 and 2010, Kingsbury joined Hockey Canada in 2016 as a director of hockey operations. She took over the nationwide girls’s program in 2018 when Melody Davidson stepped down.
The PWHL, increasing by 4 groups subsequent season to a 12-team league, has churned the teaching and administration ranks, which in flip makes Hockey Canada’s quest to search out replacements for Kingsbury and Ryan extra complicated.
“We’ve carried out fairly a bit of study, however the sands proceed to shift beneath our toes,” stated Hockey Canada chief govt officer Katherine Henderson.
“I’m thrilled that there’s 4 new (PWHL) groups. I’m additionally saying now there’s 4 new opponents for a full-time job. I could need to go after a few of these folks. We’re going to must up our recreation a bit of bit and say ‘come and work with Hockey Canada.’”
The PWHL’s growth group in Hamilton employed former U.S. girls’s hockey group captain Meghan Duggan as normal supervisor, former Canadian goaltender Manon Rheaume is Detroit’s GM, and former participant agent Dominique DiDia is the brand new GM in Las Vegas.
Hockey Canada’s search committee for a GM, who will select a head coach, contains former nationwide group gamers Gillian Apps, Therese Brisson and Cassie Campbell, former Toronto Maple Leafs normal supervisor Brad Treliving, Hockey Canada executives Scott Salmond and Misha Donskov, and Personal The Podium’s Cara Thibault.
“It’s a mixture of people that have performed in this system, some individuals who know the system, after which folks from the world of super-competitive skilled hockey that know what it takes with a purpose to put these groups collectively,” Henderson stated.
“A part of what they’re going to be doing is to check out the evaluation that we’ve carried out on the place are we proper now and the place will we should be subsequent yr for the ladies’s worlds, a yr after for the ladies’s worlds, after which the Olympic Video games is absolutely necessary for this group.”
Canada will want a GM and coach for the ladies’s world championship, Nov. 6-16 in Herning and Esbjerg, Denmark. The 2027 world championship is in Quebec Metropolis.
Canada fell 2-1 in additional time to the USA within the Olympic girls’s hockey remaining Feb. 19 in Milan, Italy, for an eighth straight loss to its archrival.
“We need to contend for a medal at each single worldwide occasion we play and ideally the color is gold,” Henderson stated. “That will likely be what we put in entrance of this GM.”
The PWHL has rapidly altered the ladies’s hockey panorama. The Worldwide Ice Hockey Federation shifted the world championship, traditionally held in April, to November beginning this yr to keep away from battle with the PWHL season.
The 2026 Olympic girls’s hockey match was the primary within the PWHL period. Canada’s girls now not spend 5 to 6 months collectively coaching and taking part in video games forward of an Olympic Video games.
Ryan and Kingsbury, who led Canada to Olympic gold in 2022, have been the primary to carry high management roles with each a PWHL group and the Canadian girls’s group concurrently.
Apart from her desire for a full-time girls’s normal supervisor, Henderson needed to go away her search committee a clean slate for the search. The CEO didn’t rule out the subsequent GM or coach having PWHL connections.
A hybrid of Hockey Canada workers and NHL normal managers and coaches has historically led Canada’s males into world championships and Olympic Video games.
“We now must reside in a world most likely nearer to how we put collectively our males’s senior groups,” Henderson stated.
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