How Canada kept its eyes on the prize
Team led by Kingsbury didn’t linger on recent rocky past. They just looked forward
It’s a common sports reflex. A once-great organization finds itself in the midst of a struggle, and the presiding brain trust digs back into its storied history to find the solutions.
Long-suffering fans of the Edmonton Oilers would politely suggest the method is not a panacea. Playing for a dynasty doesn’t give dibs on the cheat code to create a new one. In some ways, the naming of Gina Kingsbury as the general manager of Canada’s national women’s hockey team in the wake of the program’s devastating loss to the United States at the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018 could have been seen as an Oilers-esque nod to better days. Kingsbury, after all, won Olympic gold medals in 2006 and 2010 in a decade-long run as a national-team player in the golden age of Canada’s women’s juggernaut.
And certainly when she took over from longtime GM and two-time gold-medal-winning coach Melody Davidson, Kingsbury was taking over a program at sea. Not only had Canada failed to deliver a gold medal at the Olympics for the first time since 1998; the team hadn’t won a world championship since 2012. And if there were those inclined to minimize the extent of the problem, pointing out that the Olympic loss had come in a shootout that could have gone either way, Kingsbury was having none of it. In one of her first meetings as GM, Kingsbury said it was important to acknowledge the reality of the situation.
“We just said it out loud, ‘Hey, we’re second-best right now,’ ” she said in a recent interview. “I think everyone in the room wanted to become No. 1. So we said, ‘Let’s do it collectively.’ ”
It’s safe to say that, nearly four years into Kingsbury’s run as GM, Canada is back to being the sport’s undisputed No. 1. Not only did Canada beat the U.S. for the gold medal this week, the high-scoring and infectiously high-spirited team is also the reigning world champion.
And it’s worth taking note of the underpinnings of Kingsbury’s considerable renovation of the program. It’s not that there weren’t growing pains as an executive neophyte finding her footing in a new gig back in 2018. “My first few weeks, I felt like I was drowning,” she said. “I was a fish out of water.”
Things got worse before they got better. At the 2019 world championship, don’t forget, Canada didn’t simply fail to win gold on the fifth straight occasion. It failed to advance to the gold-medal game for the first time.
“It stung. You never want to be the first to make history on the wrong side,” Kingsbury said.
But Davidson, for one, had faith that Kingsbury had the tools and the savvy to figure things out.
“The biggest thing I thought was, ‘She’ll be different. She’ll be different than I am.’ And she has been,” Davidson said. “And it’s been to the betterment of the program, which is what you want.”
You can make the case it has been for the betterment of the program because Kingsbury, from the beginning, resisted the urge to recreate the gold-medal programs of yesteryear. Kingsbury’s mission statement wasn’t to turn the team of Marie-Philip Poulin and Natalie Spooner and Sarah Nurse and Jocelyne Larocque into some carbon copy of the teams she played for a generation before (although Kingsbury, 40, is young enough to have been a linemate of a teenage Poulin back in 2010).
“I felt the big thing for us was to park the past,” Kingsbury said. “So let’s not worry about trying to replay the past and go back to the tradition of winning. It’s important now to look forward and form the team the way we want to form the team moving forward.”
Indeed, just as this generation of athletes are far from carbon copies of the previous generation’s, this generation’s coaches can’t conduct business in the same way as their mentors. And thanks to Kingsbury’s commitment to allowing the players to “be themselves,” instead of bowing to hockey orthodoxy, this edition of Canada’s women’s team is unlike any squad that’s come before it.
“She’s created a culture that we’re a family and we have fun and we trust each other and we believe in each other,” said Larocque, the stalwart defender. “We’re so lucky to have her. She’s literally the best GM I’ve ever played for.”
Said Spooner: “Gina was a fresh set of eyes. Her having had the experience as a player, she’s really a great GM for players. She’s always there for us. Everyone’s opinion is taken into account, and it makes it a really awesome team.”
Speaking of veering from the easy decision: Kingsbury wasn’t afraid, for instance, to ice a Beijing-bound roster with 10 Olympic newcomers, this when the conventional wisdom has favoured a lean toward experience. Neither was Kingsbury afraid to hire head coach Troy Ryan, never mind the legitimate quarrel that women coaches ought to be granted more plum assignments. Kingsbury’s rationale: Ryan, who had been with the team as an assistant in 2018 and clearly had a rapport with the group, was the best candidate for the job.
More than anything, though, Kingsbury resisted the common sports reflex. She made a point of not telling old gold-medal stories. She eschewed the urge to say “This is how we used to do it” in favour of soliciting her players’ vision for how they’d like to get the job done. Instead of a pale imitation of a longlost Canadian model, Kingsbury produced a vivid original of a goldmedal masterpiece.
“These athletes realized it was their time to write their own story,” Kingsbury said. “It was probably easier than we thought. We just gave each other permission. I don’t think we’d ever said it out loud: ‘Let’s not look back.’ This is a program of winning, and such winning tradition. That’s great, and we’re proud of that. But this is a new generation of athletes that needed to pave their own road and needed to do it their own way. You needed to just give them permission to be themselves, not try to mimic what we’ve done in the past. And, to their credit, they took it and ran with it.”
We just said it out loud, ‘Hey, we’re second-best right now.’ I think everyone in the room wanted to become No. 1. So we said, ‘Let’s do it collectively.’
GINA KINGSBURY, GENERAL MANAGER OF CANADA’S NATIONAL WOMEN’S HOCKEY TEAM