Troy Ryan was getting ready to go through another expansion process with the Toronto Sceptres when he got word he’d be doing it about 3,000 miles away instead. He would also have to build a team from scratch in a new expansion process, and do so as the league’s first dual coach and general manager for a new San Jose team.
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He hasn’t come out to the Bay Area yet since taking the job. In fact, he expected to spend much of this offseason taking a break while his Toronto home was renovated.
The PWHL said, not so fast.
“I thought it would be a relaxing offseason,” Ryan said on a phone call with the Bay Area News Group. “But when you add the general manager duties to your work with an expansion process and an entry draft coming up, there’s a lot of stuff to be done right now.”
Ryan’s decade-long run coaching the Canadian national team came to an end in February after losing to the U.S. in the gold medal game at the Milan Olympics. He said he anticipated this would be around the time he would transition out of that role and focus only on his PWHL duties, perhaps growing into becoming a GM, the job he originally applied for when the league began four years ago.
“There was a part of me that wanted to continue to coach,” the 54-year-old hockey lifer said. “At that point, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the PWHL, because it hadn’t started yet.”
Ryan led the Sceptres to the postseason in their first two years after taking over in 2023.
When the league expanded this spring to four more markets, PWHL officials asked Ryan if he would take on the role with San Jose. But it came with a caveat – they wanted to see how it would work to have a coach and a general manager take on both jobs at once.
“The great thing about that position is every team in this league has generally a standard organizational structure with a little bit of variance in each one,” he said. “But not any of them are the exact same. I know myself, and I think the league is curious if this sort of model could be something that future teams adopt as well.”
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He also noted that the structure frees up money to potentially hire a young assistant manager who could grow to manage his or her own team in time.
Ryan and his soon-to-be-hired hockey operations team will prepare for the most chaotic PWHL offseason yet with four expansion teams and a complicated expansion process that does not include a draft.
Ryan was last in a dual GM/coach role with the Maritime Junior Hockey League’s Campbellton Tigers in 2015-16, a much different position than building an expansion team from scratch, with consistent drafts of local players from youth leagues.
Stepping away from Team Canada seemed like the right time to give it a go.
“Seeing the same players, where before it was like almost two different environments and two different staffs and two different groups of athletes,” he said of last season. “So I think it’ll be much more natural, not implying it’s going to be easy, but it’ll feel much more natural, because you know the relationships are all from the same group of people, not two different teams.”
The entry draft is June 17 in Detroit, with leaguewide free agency opening two days later. Ryan has just over three weeks to wade through the complex expansion process. Then, he might get that short break before preparing to coach a brand-new team, a continent away, with the season beginning in November.
“There is a lot to be done right now,” he said. “The renovation might get put on hold for a little bit.”
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