It was a few years later that she took her first steps as a coach. Campbell was teaching power skating at the Pursuit of Excellence Hockey Academy in Kelowna, British Columbia, when Peter Elander, a longtime women’s hockey coach who led Sweden to a silver medal at the Turin Olympics in 2006, asked her if she wanted to come to Sweden.
“He knew that I wanted to be, at the time, a skating and skills coach at that level,” she said. So he offered me to come to Malmo and I worked with the junior team, then I had the opportunity to help the professional team for a while.
After that season, Campbell returned to North America and her fledgling business, JC Powerskating, where she studied with NHL players, including Los Angeles Kings defenseman Joel Edmundson, Nashville Predators defenseman Luke Schenn and Carolina Hurricanes forward Tyson Jost. She also worked with forward Natalie Spooner, her former teammate on Team Canada and current member of the Toronto Scepters in the LPHF.
“I felt like she was a step ahead with all her skating techniques to really disguise your skating decisions,” Spooner said. We tried to replicate what she could do.
“It was a challenge at first, and she taught it so well that I was able to learn it by the end of the summer and become a much better skater. I can hide a lot of my movements in my skating, which is very useful. »
Campbell’s next opportunity to coach didn’t take long to come in Germany in 2021-22. She joined the Nuremberg team of the German Hockey League (DEL), where she initially served as skating and skills coach. During the second half of the regular season, head coach Tom Rowe asked him to take care of Nuremberg’s special teams.
“He said, ‘OK, tell the guys, you’re coming on the bench tonight and running the power play,'” she recalled. Minutes after leading a team development session, skills, I found myself behind the bench, in my coaching tracksuit, trying to coaches. »
Campbell calls it a “moment of realization, almost a revelation.”
“I realized I was teaching skating and skills the same way I was teaching behind the bench and trying to connect the pieces and break them down the same way for the guys. Now, at the professional level, they can connect the dots and execute. I found it fun to be able to do this in real time. It not only helped make a difference in their game, but also in the success of the team, and it completely changed the way I saw things. I wanted to be behind the bench and be closely involved in the tactical aspect, not just in development. »
*
Campbell was preparing to leave her Las Vegas hotel room to head to USHL prospects camp in Tri-City in June 2022 when she received an email.
It was a message from Bylsma, the subject of which was “Request for information to be a trainer”. She remembers the email saying: “Hello, I’m Dan Bylsma. I am looking to connect with you if you have interest in a hockey management opportunity. »
She thought it was spam.
After all, Bylsma won the Stanley Cup with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2009 and also coached the Buffalo Sabres.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to respond, but I don’t know who I’m responding to or if this person is real,'” Campbell recalled. Finally he called me. It was quite surreal. »
During his search for an assistant, Bylsma spoke with Francis, Coachella Valley vice president of hockey operations Troy Bodie and Kraken assistant general manager Jason Botterill.
“During this conversation, Jessica was on television behind the Germany bench at the World Championship,” explained Bylsma, who obtained her contact details by email through the Linkedin site.
« [C’était une] young trainer who was starting to climb the steps in her journey in the coaching. This is how the investigation – I suppose it was an investigation – began into Jessica: her journey, where she was in Germany with the national team, in Germany with the the DEL and in Malmo before that. »
On July 5, 2022, the Firebirds hired Campbell, making her the first woman to hold a full-time coaching position in AHL history. Under his leadership, Coachella Valley’s power play ranked 14th (20.3 percent) in the AHL in 2022-23 and was the same last year (18.4 percent).
Campbell may be great with X’s and O’s, but she’s just as good at developing relationships with players.
“I think the biggest thing with some of these players is they want to feel like you’re behind them. They want to know that you are just as determined as they are to get them to the NHL. “That was a great quality of Jess,” Bodie said. She worked with them every day, before and after practice. She became the person to go to for help.
“We discovered that some young people, once their junior season was over, would come to us and approach Jess directly to ask for help with their skating. And she did it. She turned it into a second full-time job. She has a great resume for developing skating and skills, and then putting it all together. There was no shortage of requests for his services. »
Campbell is counting down the hours until Tuesday’s puck drop. About 15 family members and friends will travel to Seattle to watch the game.
“For them, it’s a bit like my wedding day in hockey. They wouldn’t want to miss it,” she said.
It is certainly a day to celebrate. It has been, in Campbell’s words, “a phenomenal journey” and she hopes it’s just the beginning of a long NHL career.
“I find myself here now and when I look back on the last three or four years since I started setting out on my own path, I never really imagined that this would come to fruition, let alone in the way that it did. is produced. But I was convinced that I could do it, and I focused on this project,” she emphasized.
“I’m here now and I want to enjoy it, especially with Dan and a lot of kids who grew up with us at Coachella, which makes the pieces all fit together. I think the timing is really good.”
Contributed by NHL.com Editorial Director Shawn P. Roarke and NHL.com Reporter Derek van Diest.
