Hockey Canada announced Tuesday that GM Gina Kingsbury and coach Troy Ryan will not return next season, with contracts set to expire in June by mutual agreement. The shake-up lands as the PWHL expands to a 12-team league and adds new competitors for top hockey
The decision didn’t come with a drumroll. Just after the Olympic cycle ends, Hockey Canada has moved on from its women’s leadership.
Hockey Canada announced Tuesday that general manager Gina Kingsbury will not return next season after eight years overseeing the national women’s team. Kingsbury is also the GM of the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s Toronto Sceptres. and her departure leaves both an on-ice program and a business connection behind at the same time.
The organization is also parting ways with Troy Ryan. After February’s Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Ryan indicated he wouldn’t continue coaching Canada’s women. Hockey Canada’s contracts with Kingsbury and Ryan were set to expire in June. and the organization said the parting with both was by mutual agreement.
Ryan’s new role underscores how quickly the hockey job market has changed. He was recently hired as head coach and GM of the PWHL’s expansion team in San Jose after three seasons coaching Kingsbury’s Sceptres.
Kingsbury, for her part, has been embedded in Hockey Canada for years. After a playing career that included Olympic gold medals in 2006 and 2010. she joined Hockey Canada in 2016 as a director of hockey operations. She took over the national women’s program in 2018 when Melody Davidson stepped down. Ryan had been the head coach appointed by Kingsbury after she promoted him; he went on to win three world championships and an Olympic gold medal over the six years following that promotion.
The timing of Hockey Canada’s search comes with pressure that doesn’t have anything to do with performance alone. Professional Women’s Hockey League teams have been snapping up candidates, and the league is preparing to expand by four teams next season to a 12-team league.
Hockey Canada’s CEO Katherine Henderson didn’t sugarcoat the reality of competing for people. “We’ve done quite a bit of analysis, but the sands continue to shift underneath our feet,” she said.
“I’m thrilled that there’s four new (PWHL) teams. I’m also saying now there’s four new competitors for a full-time job. I may want to go after some of those people. We’re going to have to up our game a little bit and say ‘come and work with Hockey Canada.’”
Henderson’s comments land in a landscape where the league’s expansion has already begun to draw talent from the broader ecosystem. The PWHL’s expansion team in Hamilton hired former U.S. women’s hockey team captain Meghan Duggan as general manager. Former Canadian goaltender Manon Rheaume is Detroit’s GM. and former player agent Dominique DiDia was named the new GM in Las Vegas.
That churn is part of what makes Hockey Canada’s next hire more complicated than simply finding a strong coach or a proven hockey executive. The organization has a search committee for a GM—who will choose a head coach—made up of former national team players Gillian Apps. Therese Brisson and Cassie Campbell. former Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving. Hockey Canada executives Scott Salmond and Misha Donskov. and Own The Podium’s Cara Thibault.
Henderson said the group is meant to blend familiarity with the program and the demands of the modern professional game. “It’s a combination of people who have played in the program. some people who know the system. and then people from the world of super-competitive professional hockey that know what it takes in order to put those teams together. ” she said.
Their work isn’t theoretical. Henderson described a task that runs on a tight schedule of major tournaments: “Part of what they’re going to be doing is to take a look at the analysis that we’ve done on where are we right now and where do we need to be next year for the women’s worlds. a year after for the women’s worlds. and then the Olympic Games is really important for this team.”.
Canada’s immediate deadline is the women’s world championship, Nov. 6-16 in Herning and Esbjerg, Denmark. The 2027 world championship is in Quebec City.
The Olympic finish in Milan still hangs over the conversation. Canada fell 2-1 in overtime to the United States in the Olympic women’s hockey final Feb. 19 in Milan, Italy, marking an eighth straight loss to its archrival. Henderson tied the leadership search to the goal Hockey Canada has publicly set: “We want to contend for a medal at every single international event we play and preferably the colour is gold. That will be what we put in front of this GM.”.
Underneath the coaching and management moves is another structural shift that’s already reshaping how the national team prepares. The PWHL has quickly altered the women’s hockey calendar. The International Ice Hockey Federation moved the world championship. historically held in April. to November starting this year to avoid conflict with the PWHL season.
The 2026 Olympic women’s hockey tournament was the first in the PWHL era, and Canada’s women no longer spend five to six months together training and playing games ahead of an Olympic Games.
Ryan and Kingsbury were also part of a new kind of leadership overlap. They were the first to hold top leadership roles with both a PWHL team and the Canadian women’s team simultaneously, with both credited for Canada’s Olympic gold in 2022.
Henderson said she wanted the search process to start from a clean slate. She expressed a preference for a full-time women’s general manager and didn’t rule out a next GM or coach with PWHL connections.
She also contrasted what Hockey Canada has traditionally done with its men’s teams. A hybrid of Hockey Canada staff and NHL general managers and coaches has traditionally led Canada’s men into world championships and Olympic Games. “We now need to live in a world probably closer to how we put together our men’s senior teams. ” Henderson said.
For now, the only certainty in Hockey Canada’s women’s program is that the leadership chapter is ending. Kingsbury’s eight-year run and Ryan’s Olympic-era coaching spell are closing as the PWHL expands and the search begins—set against a calendar where the world championship is only months away and the expectation is clear.
Hockey Canada Gina Kingsbury Troy Ryan PWHL Toronto Sceptres San Jose expansion women’s hockey Olympic women’s hockey Milan Cortina United States vs Canada world championship Herning Esbjerg Katherine Henderson Gillian Apps Therese Brisson Cassie Campbell