By JOHN FINERAN
SOUTH BEND – Fittingly, on the eve of the NCAA Frozen Four in St. Louis that concludes the 2024-25 college hockey season, snow flurries filled the northern Indiana skies as Notre Dame formally introduced 40-year-old Brock Sheahan as its fifth head coach, succeeding Jeff Jackson.
Jackson, who retired after a 20-year tenure which included four trips and two runner-up finishes in the Frozen Four, was joined by athletic administrators, other sports head coaches (including football’s Marcus Freeman), team personnel and returning hockey players as athletic director Pete Bevacqua welcomed Sheahan and his family (wife Ashley, children Beau and Evelyn) at the press conference held inside the Knute Rockne Gate of Notre Dame Stadium.
Rockne, the Norwegian immigrant whose 1924 football team provided Notre Dame with its first national championship in any sport, certainly would approve of the stated goal of Sheahan, who played defense on Jackson’s first three teams at Notre Dame, the last of which finished runner-up to Boston College in 2008 in the Frozen Four at Denver.
“We obviously want to win at the highest level,” Sheahan said. “We want to win conference championships. We want to win that first national championship.”
Jackson told Bevacqua last June he wanted to retire after his upcoming 20th season in South Bend. “Jeff came in and mentioned that this year was going to be his last year, and we needed to start thinking about the future,” Bevacqua recalled. “And I said, you know, we’re going to do a national search. Jeff said, well, go ahead and knock yourself out. But we got the right person right here at Notre Dame. And I knew Brock a little bit, but then really got to know him over the course of that process.”
After Sheahan and Bevacqua met, the athletic director was convinced. “To be honest, in the first 45 seconds of the conversation, I said to myself, this is our next head hockey coach,” Bevacqua said. “You just knew immediately.”
Under Jackson’s leadership, the Irish won eight conference titles and twice were runners-up in the Frozen Fours of 2008 and 2018. Including six seasons as head coach at Lake Superior State where his teams won a pair of NCAA championships, Jackson’s college coaching record was 601-343-98.
But since a 2-1 loss to Minnesota Duluth in the 2018 championship game in St. Paul, Minn., Notre Dame has appeared in just three NCAA tournaments and suffered through a pair of losing seasons. It finished last in the Big Ten this season but did manage to knock out then No. 3 Minnesota in the first round of the league tournament before falling 1-0 in the semifinals at eventual No. 1-ranked Michigan State to finish 12-25-1.
People ask me this question around the rinks – is this a rebuild?” Sheahan continued. “This is not a rebuild. And the confidence I have in that is some of these guys sitting right here. I know this because of the type of young men they are. We have way more talent than people think in our locker room. I know that because I see you guys every day. We have student-athletes that value everything Notre Dame has to offer.
“We’ve faced some real adversity the past two years,” Sheahan said. “If we lean into that next season, this spring, this summer, I believe that’s going to lead to success for the program in short order.”
Remaining as one of Sheahan’s three assistants with principal duties as the team’s recruiting guru will be longtime associate head coach Andy Slaggert, who has been involved with the program as a player (four seasons) and assistant (the past 31 seasons). Paul Pooley, who over 20 seasons with Jackson at two coaching stops as an associate head coach, is joining his friend in retirement. Sheahan expects to name two other assistants in the coming weeks.
The new Notre Dame head coach believes consistency will be a key for the team’s success.
It’s hard to stick to the process when things get hard,” Sheahan said. “In my experience as a head coach, I believe consistency is something that I do very well. And that’s something we will do, whether it’s recruiting the right type of player, whether it’s how we practice, watch film and whatever we do. We’ll be consistent.”
It was during his fifth professional season, playing for the Ontario (Calif.) Reign of the East Coast Hockey League in 2012-13, that Sheahan said he and wife Ashley planned out a coaching future that one day would land him back in South Bend as head coach. After spending a season as a volunteer coach at Notre Dame, the Lethbridge, Alberta, native spent four seasons as an assistant coach at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., before joining the Chicago Steel of the United States Hockey League as an associate head coach in 2018.
Late in 2019, he took over as the Steel’s head coach and went 108-30-12-3 through the 2021-22 season. He then went 35-29-5 as head coach of the Chicago Wolves of the American Hockey League before returning to his alma mater as an associate head coach.
“I just want everyone to know that we’ll do things the right way,” Sheahan said. “Coach Jackson has showed me that. That’s extremely important to do things the right way at Notre Dame. We’ll push our players and our teams to reach their full potential. And at the end of the day, my hope is they’ll leave Notre Dame with lasting habits, better people, better players, leave here as champions, and leave here with every single door open to them in the future.”
Sheahan said the transfer portal and the NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) money college athletes can receive won’t get in the way of Notre Dame recruiting the players it needs to succeed.
“We don’t have anybody in the portal, so I think we can build within and recruiting is going to be a big piece of that,” Sheahan said. “Not that we won’t take a player or two out of the portal. They have to be a fit. They have to fit our style of play. They’ve got to fit a need and they’ve got to be able to get into school. So we’ll go about it that way. I do think we are being open to what the college recruiting landscape is right now.”
Expect Notre Dame also to look at players from major junior teams in Canada as the NCAA will allow players to play collegiately as long as they haven’t been compensated beyond necessary expenses.
And those players can expect to see the Irish get more offensive – scoring goals that is.
“Any team that I’ve been a head coach of has had a lot of offensive success,” Sheahan said. “We set the record for goals in the USHL and won a lot of hockey games. Our power plays ran (converted) over 30 percent. We will play offensive hockey, but we’ll be a complete team. There are a lot of teams that are high volume right now. They shoot everything. The other side of that is high possession, which if you go too far with that, you know, you’re not shooting the puck enough.
“For us, we’ll be an offensive team that makes plays. We’ll be more of a puck possession team, but we’re gonna work to get pucks back. We’re gonna play fast. And the way that I’ve coached, it’s what I call purposeful hockey. We will teach our players to read the game and make the appropriate play. That takes a lot of work. That takes a lot of film, but when it’s learned, it’s a really fun way to play the game, and it’s a really fun way to watch the game, because there’s a lot of plays being made, a lot of scoring chances for, which is what we’re looking for.”
Notre Dame returns five of its seven top scorers in junior centers Cole Knuble (12-27-39) and Danny Nelson (13-13-26), junior left-wing Brennan Ali (7-12-19), senior defenseman Axel Kumlin (6-15-21) and junior defenseman Paul Fischer (2-19-21).
Brock Sheahan is officially introduced as Notre Dame’s fifth hockey coach in modern times Wednesday at a press conference inside Notre Dame Stadium.