Power Player: Inside the Journey of the NHL’s First Female Coach

This week, Jessica Campbell made history with the Seattle Kraken

Whether there was a blizzard outside or sun, whether it was day or night, whether it was Monday or Saturday…always, Jessica Campbell wanted to skate. Growing up in rural Saskatchewan, that was somewhat of a difficult task. The Campbell’s lived on a farm, miles away from the nearest ice rink.

But Campbell’s mom or dad would get behind the wheel, headlights leading the way through rain and fog and snow, so that their little girl could skate. “She would beg me to drive her in, even though you could barely see the road,” Campbell’s mom Monique told CNBC, “That’s how much she loved it. She just couldn’t miss a night.”
All those days and nights skating? They paid off in a historic way this week when Jessica Campbell, at only 32-years-old, became the first female assistant coach in NHL history. During stoppages, she diagrammed plays as the players for the Seattle Kraken listened and nodded.

The road to this moment led from the farm to that ice rink and then to ice rinks all over Canada. Until she was 17, Campbell played in leagues with the boys. "I remember I was coaching novice hockey," a family friend named Leo Parker told The Score. "We lose to this little novice team… I don’t know, 10-2, or something like that. Jess scored all 10 goals.”

Campbell played college hockey at Cornell, then signed with the Calgary Inferno, where she played for four years, and in 2014 made the Canadian National Team.
When she retired, she started coaching a high school girls’ team in British Columbia. But one day, after a few years in that job, she was driving through a Starbucks when a realization hit her like a defender—all at once. She called a friend and former teammate. “I just feel like I’m not fulfilled,” Campbell said on the phone. “I love the girls. They’re fun. But I just feel I have more potential.”

Soon, Campbell quit the high school. She started her own business coaching privately, specializing in power skating (which is basically what it sounds like: teaching hockey players how to skate more powerfully…and therefore, more quickly). She launched the company in 2019. Then the hockey world shut down in 2020.

COVID, though, was a boon to business. A friend of Campbell’s from childhood teams, Damon Severson, had made it to the NHL and he, along with several other NHL players, needed somewhere to skate—and somebody to coach them through drills. Soon, she was coaching a dozen NHL players as they tried to knock off rust and get ready for the NHL’s Bubble. "Everything she was asking us to do, she could do," said Bren Seabrook. "Everything. She did it, and she did it really well.”

From there, Campbell landed on the radar of professional teams. She coached in Germany, then the Seattle Kraken’s minor league team in the Coachella Valley. The Kraken promoted the minor league team’s coach to lead the NHL team in Seattle—and he brought Campbell with him.

"There is no true blueprint for anybody’s pathway," Campbell said. "If you would have looked at mine, you probably would never have said, ‘She’s going to coach in the NHL or be in this position.’ Because the reality was, nobody else was doing it. But looking back now, I feel if I connect my dots backwards, my upbringing and my story as a young girl with the boys has set me up for the right mentality.”

Campbell doesn’t often get reflective or give herself pats on the back. She’s always looking forward to the next challenge, to share credit with the rest of the team. But after the first game, after being asked again and again, after hearing the cheers a proud group of family and friends who had traveled from all over Canada and the U.S. to be there, it seems as if the magnitude of her accomplishment finally hit her. “It fuels me every day just knowing that I’m a part of something way bigger than myself and my job and coaching,” Campbell said.

She continued, “Hopefully somebody else will have a door held open for them versus them having to push it open and find ways to unlock it. I look at the other women around me and other people in the industry doing their piece and doing a fantastic job of it. And it’s part of a movement. It’s part of, I think, really important change. Anytime you have different people in the room, you get different and good outcomes; you get unique outcomes. You get problems solved in a different way. I think that’s how you get ahead in life—and in sport.”

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🏒 Sticking with our hockey theme this week (welcome back, NHL!)…this week also marked the debut of the yet-to-be-permanently-named Utah Hockey Club. In the New York Times, Tania Ganguli and Ken Belson explore how sports have become the lynchpin in Salt Lake City’s downtown boom.

🎸 RIP to Kris Kristofferson. Normally, that wouldn’t seem like a sports story. But the great Sally Jenkins shows us otherwise in a pitch-perfect Washington Post column.

🤘 Jenkins’ father, the legendary Sports Illustrated scribe Dan Jenkins, wrote the best story about the greatest sporting event in the world. I’m talking, of course, about his classic piece “The Disciples of St. Darrell on a Wild Weekend,” on the Red River Shootout between Texas and Oklahoma played annually in the Cotton Bowl smack-dab in the center of the Texas State Fair. I read this story every year and am always reminded of Jenkins’ brilliance. Oh, and of one other fact…that OU SUCKS! Hook ‘em!

🏈 In The Athletic, Kevin Fishbain talks to the Men in Blazers’ Roger Bennett about how the Englishman came to learn life lessons by cheering on the Chicago Bears. Read all the way to the end. Just trust me.