Team Canada coach Troy Ryan's journey to the Olympic stage began at the junior level in the Maritimes.David W Cerny/Reuters
Long before he was an Olympic gold-medal winning hockey coach, Troy Ryan was mucking his way through junior hockey in the Maritimes.
In that era, back in the late nineties and early 2000s, line brawls, sucker punches and suspensions were commonplace. It was not unusual for a head coach to tap one of his players on the shoulder and nod toward an opponent with an obvious implication.
“There could be books written about it,” said Ryan, the head coach of Canada’s women’s Olympic team. “It was crazy.”
Beyond running hockey operations on and off the ice, Ryan was ripping tickets and selling sponsorships. Being a GM and coach of a Maritime Jr. A Hockey League (MJAHL) team in those days meant doing it all.
Now on the doorstep of an Olympic gold-medal game for the second time as a head coach, Ryan, who comes from Spryfield, N.S., on the outskirts of Halifax, can’t help but smirk when he thinks about how far he’s come: From managing rosters made up of no-hopers and goons to one that is laden with Ivy Leaguers and pros.
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“This group of athletes has changed the trajectory of my career,” he said. “To even be a part of an Olympics is a special opportunity that I will never take for granted.”
Ryan and his team will get a chance to repeat as Olympic champions on Thursday when they face the United States in a perennial rematch for gold at the Winter Games.
When I first came across Ryan 20 years ago, it was as a player. He coached against me in the mid 2000s while I was warming the bench for three seasons in the MJAHL.
He was already a successful junior coach, and was seen as an up-and-comer in the region, which at the time had a robust Junior A and Major Junior circuit as well as the best university hockey teams in the country.
Like most coaches of his cohort, he was known to get a little hot under the collar at times, a holdover trait from his unglamorous playing days at the University of New Brunswick. (“I was not a good player,” Ryan said.)
“Some of my players now have no idea,” he said. “It’s been funny because they’ll meet some people along the way who will describe how I was, and they’ll say, ‘Who, Troy?’”
After grinding it out for about decade in junior, Ryan eventually got his shot to lead a men’s varsity program on the U Sports circuit of Atlantic University Sport (AUS).
“That was, legitimately, my NHL,” Ryan said. “That was my whole goal. It sounds stupid now when I look back, but I thought, ‘You get a pension, you get dental, medical [benefits],’ some of the things you otherwise wouldn’t.”
He was hired by St. Thomas University, a small liberal arts university in Fredericton, N.B., and my alma matter.
I was just out of school – and, totally devoid of my jock bona fides – a new reporter at the city paper in Fredericton.
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I was eventually assigned to the sports department and covered Ryan’s rookie season at the helm of the STU Tommies.
Over the course of two years, we built a professional rapport. We were both new to this – him to the university circuit, Fredericton and St. Thomas, and me to having a career.
I learned to work a beat covering his teams and he was a lot more forgiving of a newbie reporter than his counterpart down the hill at the powerhouse men’s team, the UNB Varsity Reds, who seemed to win the national championship every year.
Sensing a shift in the institution’s priorities, Ryan resigned from the job after three seasons, with no backup plan.
Ryan's Canadian squad has lost its last seven games against the United States, including a preliminary round shutout in these Games. His team remains confident that it can get the job done in a one-game scenario.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
He wrestled with taking a job in the Western Hockey League, a rung above Junior A, but below the university ranks. A coaching friend advised that a failure in the Western League could spell the end of his career. Instead, he ate some humble pie and returned to where it all began: the MJAHL, where he took control of the Campbellton Tigers.
“I ended up making a backwards move, and it was probably the best thing that could’ve ever happened to me,” he said. “This all happened from the Campbellton Jr. A Tigers.”
Ryan said he never made a concerted decision to switch to coaching in the women’s game. It just sort of happened.
While still in Campbellton, he took a short term gig coaching the 15-year-olds on the Nova Scotia Canada Games team. That’s when he was spotted by Melody Davidson, the former coach of the women’s national team.
From that point on, his career moved in a different direction. He left Campbellton for Dalhousie University in 2017 and took his first big job as a women’s coach. That same year he joined Davidson’s staff on the national team. He got her job when she left in 2020.
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Two years later, he won Olympic gold at the 2022 Games.
A second one won’t come easy. The Canadians are considered heavy underdogs. They’ve lost seven straight to the Americans.
Still, he’s had teams overcome a disadvantage in big moments before, in, surprise surprise, the MJAHL.
Back in 2008, while he was pushing through the early stages of his coaching career with the Pictou County Weeks Crushers in Nova Scotia, his team was named host for the Fred Page Cup, the Eastern Canadian Jr. A Championships.
The Crushers weren’t even good enough to make it out of their own league that season, but as hosts, they were handed an automatic entry into the tournament.
They would have to face the champions of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes.
To the shock of everyone watching, they sneaked their way into the tournament final, where they knocked off one of the best teams in the country, the Pembroke Lumber Kings. The upset punched their ticket to the Royal Bank Cup, the National Jr. A Championship. Ryan says it was a simple change of tactics in the final that confused the Lumber Kings, who had earlier in the tournament beat Pictou County in a rout.
Years later, the coach of that team approached Ryan at a seminar and told him, more less, that the Crushers won because of Ryan’s tactics.
“It was basically a pee-wee level defence, and they just had no idea how to play against it,” Ryan said. “We caught them by surprise.”
Ryan hopes Team Canada can do something similar Thursday.
Oh, and the coach of that Pembroke team? It was Sheldon Keefe, the former Toronto Maple Leafs bench boss and current head coach of the New Jersey Devils.