From Rebirth to Heartbreak: Troy Ryan's Team Canada Legacy
While feelings may be unhappy towards Troy Ryan right now following the 2-1 OT loss to the U.S. at the Olympics, he will be leaving the national program as their second most successful coach.
This year's Olympic women's hockey final was a classic Canada versus USA gold medal game, and it delivered. There was a shorthanded goal, a goal scored in the last few minutes with the goalie pulled, and of course, an OT winner (or a golden goal, as some might call it). Both teams fought tooth and nail for every inch of ice, got a fair amount of scoring chances, and saw a lot of big saves. It’s everything you could hope for, and if you’re going to lose, this is one of those losses where you leave with your head held high. Three-on-three OT is a completely different game than what you see in regulation, but a win is a win and a loss is a loss.
In three-on-three overtime in Italy at the 2026 Olympic Winter Games, Canada saw the end of the most successful run they’ve seen out of a head coach since Melody Davidson. Unfortunately for Troy Ryan and Team Canada, it wasn’t quite the ride off into the sunset that everyone was hoping for. Team USA blueliner Megan Keller got by Claire Thompson then slid the puck through Ann-Renée Desbiens to give the USA a gold medal, while Canada would have to settle for silver. A tough loss, though you can’t say the team didn’t go down swinging as best they could.
Being around social media and just the media as a whole, I get that feelings right now towards Troy Ryan aren’t the most positive, especially from Canadian fans. There’s no sugar-coating it: this year was pretty much an abject disaster for the senior women’s program in preparation for the Olympics, and at times during the Olympic tournament, it looked like the situation was headed off the rails. While it’s somewhat fair to include the two losses from the 2025 IIHF World Championships, those losses were one-goal games.
Starting with the Rivalry Series in November 2025, everything went off the rails quickly. The USA took a commanding 2-0 series lead while outscoring Canada 10-2. Not great. though Canada has been used to taking losses early in the Rivalry Series only to come back and win the rest of the games for the series victory. The problem is that once the series came to Edmonton for the final two games, the yellow flags turned to red flags. Canada once again lost both games and were outscored 14-5. To make matters worse, Canada then lost 5-0 to the USA in the Olympic round robin games.
With the Toronto Sceptres being in the bottom of the league, growing concerns about the performance of Troy Ryan’s teams following the 2023 Worlds, and the five-game losing streak starting from the pre-Olympic Rivalry Series, the general consensus was that people wanted a new head coach for Team Canada. The overtime loss to Team USA in the gold medal game certainly did nothing to put those feelings to bed—though it’s not really going to matter what people feel like, as Troy Ryan’s contract with Hockey Canada for the senior national team is over. National hockey federations usually swap out coaches, even successful ones, so no matter how the Olympics turned out, this was it for Troy Ryan. Though nothing is official yet, it’s not a hard guess to make just based on decades of history.
It's unfortunate Troy Ryan’s tenure has ended this way because he deserves a lot more credit than he’s getting at the moment. If you’re going to pin this struggle of a season on him, then fine—just make sure to credit him with all the success he’s had leading up to this moment, which has been a lot. Troy Ryan has delivered Canada four gold medals, three at Worlds (2021, 2022, 2024) and one at the Olympics (2022). Before this season, Troy Ryan also oversaw Canada winning every Rivalry Series. As with every coach, there’s always going to be criticism, but he was getting results.
That’s a far cry from what came before him, after Melody Davidson stopped coaching after the 2010 Winter Olympics. Post-2010 Olympics was a dark time for the Canadian women’s senior program. In the nine tournaments that took place from 2011 to 2019, Canada won a total of two gold medals (at the 2012 Worlds and 2014 Olympics) and even finished with a bronze medal at the 2019 Worlds. It was looking like women’s hockey at the senior level was about to become a purely USA-dominated sport.
If you weren’t around then, it felt pretty hopeless, as no coach appeared to be able to get the most out of Canadian talent. And about two months before the 2014 Olympics, the players demanded their head coach Dan Church be fired. He was, and then Kevin Dineen was quickly made head coach with the nearly impossible task of getting a team that was nearly done with centralization Olympic-ready. It’s not a fun fact that the last Canadian coach to get a gold happened to be an emergency coach.
With COVID subsiding enough where hockey tournaments can occur again, Team Canada was looking for a new bench boss to lead the way, and in came Troy Ryan. He wasn't unfamiliar with the players or the program. He was the head coach of the 2017 U18 Worlds team and had been an assistant coach for the senior team since the 2017 Worlds. Canada needed a coach to finally maximize Canadian talent, and did they ever get one.
They immediately won a gold medal at the 2021 Worlds and ran the tournament the same way the USA just did at the 2026 Olympics, which also featured an overtime win. It was Canada's first gold medal at a Worlds since 2012 and first gold medal at a major tournament since the 2014 Olympics. Canada led the tournament in goals for (34) and goal differential (+27), while also beating the USA 5-1 in the round robin.
To show it wasn’t a fluke, Canada went on to win the 2022 Olympics with 57 goals for and a +47 goal differential. No overtime needed either in the gold medal game. The team was rolling, Sarah Nurse was setting records, Marie-Philip Poulin was setting herself up to break a record, and Canada couldn’t stop winning. The team was still winning into the 2022 Worlds, and while not as dominant as a performance, it was clear they were the team to beat.
Cracks started to show during the 2023 Worlds. And while Canada won the 2024 Worlds, followed by the 2024-25 Rivalry Series, the current run of eight straight Team USA wins over Canada began as soon as the 2025 Worlds started. That’s where we sit today, with arguably the second greatest coach in Canadian women’s hockey history ending with a lot less fanfare than he deserves. I definitely haven’t been shy about my criticism of him, and I do believe it’s time to part ways. Despite this season's result, I hope people are able to look back to appreciate what he did for the program in getting it back to its winning ways.
It’s fair to say that Troy Ryan and the Canadian coaching didn’t adjust quickly enough to match the USA. The talent is there for Canada to be Team USA’s equals. They proved it in the gold medal game, looking like a team for the first time this 2025-26 season. If they had found that cohesion earlier on, maybe the result would have been different. Maybe a few different swaps of players would have made a difference. It’s impossible to look at this 2026 Olympic ġold medal game and not see that this was always in them, but for whatever reason, it just never happened until now.
Obviously the question now is who is going to lead Team Canada on the bench? Who'll turn Canada back into a consistent gold medal winner? Typically they promote from the assistant coaches to the head coaching position. That would leave Montreal Victoire head coach Kori Cheverie, Victoire assistant coach Caroline Ouellette, and Syracuse University head coach Britni Smith as the front runners. With the recent success of the Canadian U18 program and those players now looking for senior national team spots, that could make Vicki Sunohara a candidate. Or perhaps they go outside the system and look at the wide variety of Canadian coaches, such as Nadine Muzerall of Ohio State University. With the 2026 Worlds coming up in November, we shouldn’t have to wait too long to know what direction Canada will be going in.
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