Ryan, Kingsbury leave Canada’s women’s national team program
After a pair of disappointing results on the world stage, there’s a changing of the guard at Hockey Canada.
On Tuesday, the organization announced that head coach Troy Ryan and general manager Gina Kingsbury will not return to the Canadian National Women’s Team for the 2026-27 season.jjm
In a statement, Hockey Canada president and CEO Katherine Henderson stated how grateful the organization is for Ryan and Kingsbury’s efforts over the past several years.
“Hockey Canada is extremely grateful for the commitment, passion and expertise that Gina and Troy displayed each time they represented Canada with our National Women’s Team,” Henderson said. “We cannot thank them both enough for providing world-class treatment to our women’s hockey program and exemplifying what it means to be a leader on the international stage.”
The announcement comes just over three months after Canada fell short of winning a second straight gold medal at the Winter Olympics, losing the championship game in overtime to the rival United States in Milan. It was the culmination of 10 months of failure by the teams Ryan and Kingsbury had put together. The Canadians lost both games to the U.S. at the 2025 IIHF Women’s World Championship, before being embarrassed in the four-game Rivalry Series late last year. Paired up with two defeats at the Winter Games, including a 5-0 decimation in the round-robin, questions about the duo’s ability to run the program came into question.
Ryan had been the head coach of the national team since 2020 after serving for a couple of years as an assistant. He helped the team get out of some dark times, guiding the team to three world champions and gold at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Kingsbury had been part of the team’s hockey operations since the 2018-19 season, serving as GM prior to the 2024 Women’s Worlds. The criticism for their roster construction came as they continued to rely on aging veterans, while the United States had managed to utilize younger talent – like Caroline Harvey, Laila Edwards and Abbey Murphy – to carry the program to two of the past three world championships and this year’s Olympics.
The search for a new GM is underway, with the successor tasked with finding the program’s next head coach. Hockey Canada is certainly working under a deadline, as the 2026 Women’s Worlds in Denmark is set to begin on Nov. 6.
Ryan and Kingsbury aren’t totally out of work. Kingsbury remains the GM of the PWHL’s Toronto Sceptres, while Ryan was hired last week as the new head coach and GM of the expansion franchise in San Jose.