How Jessica Campbell’s hockey path led her to the Kraken as an AHL assistant

Luke Schenn was interested in getting some on-ice work done during the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Tyson Jost and Damon Severson, who like Schenn spend their offseason time in Kelowna, B.C., had been working with a skills coach. Schenn wanted in.

“I see Jessica, she’s got the stereo going in the rink, she’s got — like she went to Home Depot or something — all these two-by-fours, a bunch of objects she’s setting up to stickhandle around, do some edgework around. She’s lugging all this stuff in, demonstrating what she wants you to do, like she’d been doing it forever.

“She was prepared. She knew exactly what she wanted to achieve that day. I liked that she was different — you go out for a summer skate, sometimes it’s pretty boring. She came out with a purpose, flying through the drills herself. A lot of it was, she can do it, are we going to be able to do it?”

In just two years, Campbell has ticked off a number of firsts for a female coach. She went to Nurnberg in the German League to be an assistant coach for former Panthers executive Tom Rowe this past spring, the first woman to go behind a men’s bench in pro hockey. From there, the German National team brought her on as an assistant for the World Championships, also the first woman to have such a role.

The Rangers hired her just a few weeks ago to coach at their prospect development camp that starts on Monday. She would have been the first woman to fill that role for an NHL team, except she unlocked another, bigger achievement. The Kraken’s AHL team in Coachella Valley hired her as Dan Bylsma’s assistant.

Campbell is 31 and an accomplished player, having played four years at Cornell and then three seasons with Calgary of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League. Her pivot to coaching, especially doing individual skills/skating work with Jost starting three years ago, is not a new space for women in the men’s game. Barb Underhill and Dawn Braid are among the trailblazers in skating work and going back even farther, the Islanders hired Laura Stamm in 1973 to help Bob Nystrom with his skating.

But Campbell’s ideas about the game have brought her to forefront as a coach, something that the Nurnberg players saw firsthand when she was promoted to work behind the bench midway through their season.

The Coachella Valley Firebirds have named Jessica Campbell their first assistant coach in team history.

With the @Firebirds' inaugural season this fall, Campbell will be breaking barriers as the first female assistant coach in the American Hockey League! pic.twitter.com/ubogUsqdF2

— American Hockey League (@TheAHL) July 5, 2022

“She came in with a lot of confidence and a lot of ideas,” said Tyler Sheehy, a University of Minnesota alum who led Nurnberg in scoring last season. “Our power play, our offense was really struggling and she came in to give us what she saw. It honestly worked right away — I think the PP had a couple goals that first game and things just clicked from there.”

“I’ve never seen myself different than any other coach and that’s how I approached things when I got behind the bench in Germany,” Campbell said. “I didn’t spend too long there but I was in the trenches coaching, running the power play, running practices. My job is to make my players better, deliver that message clearly and effectively so that the team can take any message I put in front of them and it will add value to their game.

“Hockey is hockey. Coaching is coaching.”

Brianne Jenner met Campbell when the two were teammates for Canada’s U18 team in 2009. They were at Cornell together and on the Calgary Firebirds together. Jenner is thrilled to not only see her old teammate and friend take these huge steps behind a men’s hockey bench, but also how many other accomplished women are filling key organizational roles in the NHL. With Kate Madigan’s promotion to become an assistant GM with the Devils on Wednesday, there are five women in AGM roles around the league and former standout players like Kendall Coyne Schofield and Meghan Duggan in development roles.

“I don’t think there’s one right way of breaking in,” Jenner said. “The exciting thing is we’re seeing so many more women given opportunities in pro hockey, starting to break down that mental barrier in society where hockey is a men’s game. Those experiences are valuable, that hockey IQ is valuable. It’s exciting to see Jess being one of those women. It’s going to make men’s hockey better and it’s going to make women’s hockey better because there will be more opportunities.”

Sheehy said there were no issues among his teammates with having a woman leading practices, meetings or hearing her on the bench during a game. “It was definitely all of our first times having a woman’s voice on the bench, but there was really no hesitation from anyone,” he said. “When you see what she’s telling us working, you want to hear more. Her ideas were great, she helped the team and everyone was on board.”

Schenn has been around the NHL a long time and has seen the front-office changes with more women involved. When asked if the barrier could be broken soon and NHL fans could see a woman, whether it’s Campbell or someone else, behind an NHL team’s bench soon, he didn’t hesitate.

“I think we’re already past that, honestly,” he said. “We had Barb Underhill as our skating coach in Toronto. Both skating coaches in Tampa are women, Barb’s there now and Tracey Tutton’s there. You’ve got women teaching guys and they don’t see anything different about it — ask Pointer (Brayden Point) about why he’s become one of the best skaters in the league and he’ll credit the women down there.

“You just want the best person to help you. Jess has really taken hold of coaching, it’s great to see and it’s working because guys respond to her and her concepts are making guys better.”

Campbell was headed to New York next week for some experience and a possible long-term situation there — the Rangers have an assistant opening at AHL Hartford and likely would have strongly considered her for the role. But Bylsma reached out in the interim and now Campbell is detouring to Seattle for the Kraken’s development camp.

“I’m just riding the waves, taking the opportunities as they come,” Campbell said just after the Rangers announced she was joining their development team for next week’s camp. “My aspirations are to get to the pro game, but it’s not a race to get to the NHL, it’s about timing. I want to be in a full-time position and I want to be selected because I’m the right coach for the job.”

Less than two weeks after saying this, she’s got that in hand. Another first.

(Photo: Jussi Eskola /Newspix24 /Sipa USA)